Advice for Writers

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Emmanuelle Malhappe on Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

This guest blog is by Emmanuelle Malhappe, French poet, short story author, playwright, and psychoanalyst. For a longer bio, please see below.

Emmanuelle Malhappe

Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

Penelope is not Ulysses' wife. She is not waiting for her husband to come back, whatever we may think about faithfulness.

Because Penelope is not a woman. She is not even an archetype. She is a character.

A character Homer invented who embodies an idea. In my view, Penelope is the feminine in every human being.

In a certain sense, Homer wrote his own version of Genesis. In the Bible, Eve is created from Adam. Not from one of his ribs, as in the mistranslations of some hermeneutical traditions, but from one of his sides. Adam could not remain alone. Not because he was bored, which would make his woman just company for him. He could not exist without her, because no one can be just half of a human being.

Ulysses is not a man. He's not Penelope's husband. He's a character Homer invented who also embodies an idea.

But what idea?

As all readers of Homer know, Ulysses went away for ten years, and then it took him ten more years to return to Ithaca. During that time, Penelope wove and unwove the shroud for her father-in-law.

Do you see the symmetry?

Ten years to go, ten years to come back for Ulysses.

Twenty years of weaving and unweaving for Penelope.

Both Ulysses and Penelope are doing the same things in different ways.

Ulysses is making war, and he experiences many things, visits many countries, loves many women. In a certain sense, we can say that Ulysses is our “hurry, hurry” side. He is always doing something. He represents the part of us that longs to do things, to have experiences.

Penelope, on the other hand, is weaving not only fabric but the fabric of her life and Ulysses’. During the day, she's weaving. During the night, she unweaves. Why? Not because of the suitors who want to marry her.

No. She's weaving and unweaving because she’s like a writer.

She embodies the creative side of every human being.

In each of us, there are two appetites, and both are appetites for learning. One to discover the world, to perceive it. The other to transform those experiences into thoughts, and sometimes into artistic works. One appetite for the world, the other from the world. That's what being a human being is.

As the aphorist and philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “The absence of contemplative life turns the active life of a society into a swarm of pestilent rats.”

Without Penelope, Ulysses is not a human being: he’s a rat.

Penelope is the part every person must have to be not just a “featherless biped,” as Plato described it, but a human being. Ulysses is the part that every human must have to experience the world.

Without experience, no creation is possible.

But without creative work, without weaving, experience cannot be transformed into what makes us human—namely language.

The writer Robert Graves, following Samuel Butler, suggested that Homer might have been a woman. Many classics scholars now believe, however, that Homer’s works come from an oral tradition rather than the work of a single author. But if the author of The Odyssey consists of multiple entities rather than just one, that only reinforces the epic’s feminine side: an entity who is but goes unacknowledged.

From the characters of Penelope and Ulysses, we can see that the feminine is embodied not only in women, and the masculine is not just embodied in men—fortunately! But those two forces are manifested in each of us, as with yin and yang.

Our feminine part is our poetic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Our masculine part is our pragmatic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Nobody can be a human being having just one of those two sides.

When Penelope weaves and unweaves, she embodies the beautiful idea that there cannot be a human being without words. Penelope’s fabric is poetry. She might be Homer herself in a vertiginous mise en abîme. Homer, who gave voice to her characters, represented herself in The Odyssey as a weaver.

Every poet knows very well what Homer/Penelope goes through. You write all day, and then, the next morning, when you look at what you wrote the day before, you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

But wait! There’s more. Despite all your efforts, the more you write, the more language eludes you.

And being a poet is knowing that, and still continuing to weave and unweave, to write and unwrite. Because creation is not only about producing a result; a collection of words is above all a path. What is important is to keep on creating. That’s what Penelope teaches us.

So Ulysses and Penelope are not a couple in the sense of wife and husband. They are a couple as two inseparable parts of every human being. Nevertheless—and Homer knew this—marriage may always be a reinterpretation of this first couple where the feminine and masculine try to work together; not only between men and women, but also inside each of us, uniting in a creative way our will to have experiences and our need to transform them into internal memories and spiritual aims.

Emmanuelle Malhappe began her career teaching literature and poetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and subsequently became a psychoanalyst. She has written plays, short stories, essays, radio programs, and poetry. Her poetry collection, Entre est le pays (Between Is the Land) was published by Éditions L’Harmattan in 2025. Her collection blending poetry and philosophy, Éclats de femme, silence du féminin (Fragments of Woman, Silence of the Feminine), was published by Éditions Ubik-Art Moresa in 2025. Also in 2025, the same publisher released her book poetry book J’ai posé ma main (I Placed My Hand). She received the Gaston Baissette Short Story Prize for her collection La Solitude des cygnes (The Solitude of Swans).

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Dániel Levente Pál on the Three Types of Poets

This is a guest blog by contemporary writer Dániel Levente Pál, one of the most internationally recognized Hungarian poets and creative artists of his generation. For Dániel’s full bio, please see below.

There are three kinds of poetry, three kinds of poets, and three kinds of poems.

The first type is the butterfly: the poet who transforms from a caterpillar into a butterfly—whose work is filled with beauty, aesthetic harmony, and wonder at the world’s splendor. Reading this kind of poetry also makes us a little more beautiful. The reader, burdened by the worries of daily life, undergoes a small metamorphosis under the influence of a butterfly-like poem—emerging from their cocoon as something lighter, more delicate, more radiant.

Dániel Levente Pál

The second type of poetry is the stone. When the poet writes, it is as if they pick up a stone and hurl it into a lake. Let’s call the lake, metaphorically or allegorically, Society—teeming with fish, with life. The stone makes an impact: it breaks the surface, creates ripples and reverberations above and below. The disturbance alters the waters, if only for a while, before they slowly return to stillness. The stone may sink, but its echo lingers.

The third kind of poetry is the blade. This poetry addresses brutal, unforgiving truths—whether personal, political, or social. It speaks of injustice, cruelty, the machinery of oppression, of the humiliated and impoverished, of domestic violence, of human suffering in all its rawness. Here, the reader doesn’t feel caressed by the poem, but cut open by it—as if by a sharp, gleaming knife. This type of poem wounds. It slits open the reader’s conscience, peels away the cataract from the moral eye. These wounds may heal, yes; but they leave behind scars—scars that remain, that remember. The encounter with poems of this sort sharpens our vision, and even when the pain subsides, the memory of that incision stays with us, a reminder of what must never be forgotten.

In the history of world poetry, all three types of poetry—and poets—are present. And rather than fall into aesthetic or critical conflict, they approach one another with open hearts, open minds, and genuine curiosity. Be it butterfly, stone, or blade, I believe each type of poetry holds its own value, with a time and place uniquely its own.

Dániel Levente Pál (born 1982) has received numerous literary, artistic, and professional awards both in Hungary and internationally. He has authored eight books in Hungarian, and works of his have been translated into more than 20 languages. Pál cofounded and served as deputy editor-in-chief of the art magazine and publishing house PRAE. He was also the editor-in-chief of ELTE University Press, and served as a managing director of the Hungarian Petőfi Cultural Agency and Literary Fund, where he was executive director of the Continental Literary Magazine.

Pál spent a decade as a performer and director at various independent theater and performing arts groups. He is currently the dramaturg/writer/librettist at the Capital Circus of Budapest and dramaturg for theatrical concerts of the Gödöllő Symphony Orchestra. https://paldaniel.wordpress.com

_____________________________________ Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Interview with Mary Mackey: In This Burning World

This blog is an interview with award-winning author Mary Mackey: poet, novelist and nonfiction writer.

Mary Mackey

Zack Rogow: On reading your book of poems In This Burning World, I was struck by how deftly you change voices. The speakers of the poems range from a goddess, to a young girl, to an older woman hoping her spouse is able to overcome health challenges. How is it possible to weave such different voices into one collection?

Mary Mackey: The voices of the goddesses are those of the Earth speaking to us. The individual voices are those of various imagined narrators who are definitely not me. For example, if I believed—as one of my narrators says—that “birds without names” were carrying me “south on a carpet of feathers,” I would be a very strange person indeed, instead of a rather boringly normal former Midwesterner.

I’m a novelist as well as a poet and have had a lot of experience creating characters. Because I created both the imagined goddesses and the individual narrators, I could do anything I wanted with them. In addition, they have a lot in common: they’re all speaking out of love for this beautiful green planet and all the living things on it. Whether they speak in peace or in anger, whether they plead or lament, whether their words come from dreams or visions or scientific observations, they all agree about one thing: the Earth as we have known it since the last Ice Age is worth preserving. Given this, I didn’t find it difficult to weave their voices into one collection.

Q.: You’ve said that your new poetry book In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse is different from your other collections. How?

Mary: All my previous collections have contained poems I wrote at various times with no single theme in mind. For example, in The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, you can find a lament for the burning of the Amazon rainforests; a meditation on infinity; poems about rural life in Kentucky in the 1950s; love poems; and a comic poem in which Leda reveals that Zeus (in his swan outfit) was a less-than-satisfactory lover.

In This Burning World is different. Taken together, the poems form a single, unified conversation about what I imagine may lie ahead of us as the climate of the Earth changes; and what we can do to preserve hope, joy, and compassion in the face of this slowly evolving catastrophe. I wanted them to be lyrical, striking, layered, and compelling; to cross political boundaries and look at what we all have in common on this beautiful green planet of ours; and, most of all, to speak to each other as well as to the reader.

Q.: Did arranging the poems in this book present you with any special challenges?

Mary: The main challenge I faced was not the arrangement of the poems themselves, but the emotional impact the arrangement would have on the reader. I wanted my readers to feel we were looking at the future together and that there was hope. So, I wrote a Preface—something I rarely do—in which I spoke about the two “burnings” in the title: the burning of climate change—which is obvious; and the burning of love, which is more nuanced. I said that if we can’t undo the effects of climate change, we can still choose to love and care for one another with passionate devotion; burn with the determination to shelter and comfort those who have lost everything; create places where grief cannot enter; and love one another as we love ourselves.

Then I arranged the poems into eight sections: In the first section are poems that imagine what the future might be like. In the second, I imagine a modern Cassandra making prophecies that are ignored. In subsequent sections, I celebrate resilience, luck and defiance, and the beauty of the world we live in now; ending with love poems from my series “The Kama Sutra of Kindness,” and a final poem about the joy of irrational laughter.

Mary Mackey became a writer by tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of nine poetry collections and 14 novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion.

_____________________________________ Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle