Anna M. Figueroa

Author: 1006234pwpadmin

  • How to Read Poetry (Even If You Think It’s Not for You)

    A Guide for Curious Readers

    I hear this more than almost anything else when I talk about my work: “I love the idea of poetry, but I never know if I’m getting it right.”

    I want to say something directly to everyone who has ever felt that way: you are already getting it right. The feeling that a poem gives you—even if you can’t explain it—is the poem working. Poetry is not a puzzle. It is not a test. It is, at its best, an invitation into a shared moment of attention—and you don’t need a degree or a dictionary to accept that invitation.

    But if you want to go deeper, if you want to read poetry the way it was meant to be read—slowly, openly, more than once—here is what I have learned, both as a reader and as the person writing the poems:

    Read It Aloud

    This is the single most important thing. Poetry is sound before it is meaning. The line breaks, the syllables, the way one word falls into the next—these are not decorations. They are part of what the poem is saying. When you read aloud, you let the poem into your body, not just your mind. And very often the body understands things the mind has to work harder to reach.

    Don’t perform it. Don’t try to sound literary. Just read it the way you would read something to a friend who you wanted to understand it.

    Read It More Than Once

    A poem is not the same the second time. The first time, you are orienting yourself—learning the landscape, meeting the speaker, hearing the music. The second time, you begin to notice what you missed: the word in the third line that changes the meaning of the fifth. The image that returns at the end. The silence in the white space.

    In 19 Poems from Vero Beach, I worked very hard to make poems that open further the more you return to them. The poems are about everything the coast teaches: how to let go, how to wait, how to stand still long enough for something to arrive.

    “Poetry is how we reach for the divine, to that which is beyond the experience itself—that which gives meaning to it all somehow. In the creation of the poem, we turn the moment into art.”

    Let Yourself Not Understand—Yet

    There are poems I have loved for years that I still can’t fully explain. And that is not a failure. That is the poem doing something language can’t do in any other form—holding something larger than an explanation.

    If a poem gives you a feeling—even a feeling you can’t name—trust that. Stay with it. Ask yourself: where in my own life have I felt something like this? What is the poem pointing toward, even if I can’t say exactly where?

    A Few Poems to Start With

    If you are new to poetry and looking for a place to begin, here are the kinds of poems I find myself recommending:

    Poems about the body of the world— ocean, weather, seasons, the light at a particular hour. These poems give you something visible to stand on while they take you somewhere invisible.

    Poems about women’s lives— desire, grief, strength, tenderness. These poems tend to be written with great honesty and are generous to the reader in ways that stay with you.

    Short poems— begin with poems that fit on a page. One image, one movement of feeling, one turn. I call them my word paintings. Let yourself read the whole thing in one breath. Then read it again.

    Poetry is not a luxury. It is one of the oldest ways human beings have had of saying: I was here. I felt this. Does it sound familiar to you? When you read a poem that stops you—that makes you set the book down for a moment and look out the window—that is the poem answering: yes.

    Anna M. Figueroa is a poet, novelist, and South Florida writer. Her newest collection, 19 Poems from Vero Beach, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Browse all her books at annamfigueroa.com.

  • Why Place Is the First Character You Write

    Why Place Is the First Character You Write

    For Readers & Aspiring Writers

    Every story has to happen somewhere. But in the best writing—the kind that stays with you long after the last page—place isn’t just a backdrop. It is a character. It breathes, it changes, it wants things. It shapes the people who move through it in ways they can’t always name.

    This is something I have learned not from craft books but from living on Florida’s Treasure Coast. The Atlantic is not the same ocean on every morning. Some days it arrives silver and still. Some days it throws itself at the shore like an argument that has waited too long. I have written toward that horizon more times than I can count, and each time, the poem or the sentence I find is different—because the water was different, and so was I.

    “The ocean does not ask permission to arrive—it simply comes, bearing salt and memory, and calls it home.”

    Place as Inner Life

    When I began writing 19 Poems from Vero Beach, I wasn’t thinking about landscape as subject matter. I was thinking about grief, about renewal, about the strange courage it takes to feel things deeply. But Vero Beach kept offering itself as a way in. The salt air on a morning walk became the scent of something I had lost. The horizon—that unbroken line between water and sky—became the boundary between who I had been and who I was slowly becoming.

    This is what place can do for writing: it gives invisible emotions a visible form. The reader can’t see inside a character’s heart, but they can see the way she stands at the edge of the water. They can feel the sand, wet under her feet, and understand without being told that she is deciding something.

    For Aspiring Writers: Learning to Write Your Place

    If you want to bring a place to life on the page—whether it’s the city you grew up in, a coastline, or a room in a house you no longer live in—here are a few things I find myself returning to:

    Go to the senses first. Before you name the place, let us feel it. What does it smell like at 6 a.m.? What sound wakes you there? The specific detail is always more powerful than the general description.

    Let place disagree with your character. If your speaker is trying to feel hopeful, let the weather be indifferent. If she’s grieving, let the light be beautiful anyway. Tension between inner weather and outer weather is one of the oldest tools in literary writing.

    Notice what changes. A place that shifts—with seasons, with time of day, with the mood of the person standing in it—feels alive. A place that never changes feels like a postcard.

    Readers: this is also an invitation to pay attention the next time a book puts you somewhere. Ask yourself—what does this place want from this character? What would be different if the story happened somewhere else? You may find that the answer is: everything.

    Anna M. Figueroa’s newest collection, 19 Poems from Vero Beach, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    Share

    Related Posts

    Join the Newsletter

    Occasional notes on new work, readings, and what I’m writing next.

  • The Courage of the Honest Sentence

    The Courage of the Honest Sentence

    On Writing Truthfully

    There is a version of every poem I have ever written that is safer than the one I published. A version where the feeling is wrapped in more sanitized language. Where the wound is dressed before anyone can see it. Where the speaker stands a little further back from the thing she is actually saying.

    I have learned—slowly, through years of drafting and revising and throwing things out—that these safer versions are also the worse ones. Not because honesty is the same as rawness. Not because beautiful language is dishonest. But because the reader can feel when you have stepped back. They can feel the distance between the writer and the truth she is circling, and that distance is the difference between a poem that stays with them and one they forget by afternoon.

    “The goal isn’t to persuade—it’s to tell the truth beautifully, and to invite the reader into a shared, authentic moment.”

    What Honesty in Writing Actually Means

    When I talk about honest writing, I don’t mean confessional writing in the sense of exposure or disclosure. I mean something subtler: the willingness to say what you actually see, feel, and think—even when it is complicated, even when it contradicts itself, even when it doesn’t resolve into a lesson.

    In my poetry collection A Woman Full Grown, I was writing about the interior life of women—desire, grief, strength, the quiet negotiations we make every day. Some of those poems took me to places I wasn’t expecting to go. The honest version of a poem about love sometimes arrives as a poem about loneliness. The honest version of a poem about strength sometimes arrives as a poem about how tired strength can make you.

    That is what the honest sentence does. It takes you somewhere you didn’t plan to go, and when you arrive, you recognize the place—because it is true.

    For Aspiring Writers: How to Stop Hiding on the Page

    If you feel yourself pulling back from what you are really trying to say, here are the questions I ask myself:

    What is the thing I’m afraid to write? Usually the answer to that question is exactly the thing the piece needs. Not because we should always write our fears—but because where there is resistance, there is energy. Something is alive in that fear.

    Am I writing the scene, or the scene behind the scene? In Intimate Strangers, I started off hesitant about being so raw in describing the scenes of passion between the main characters. I admit I was a little embarrassed at first. I moved past the embarrassment as I got to know my characters more deeply as I wrote their story. They were so vividly alive in my imagination that I could not water down how I know they would love each other. That meant creating more than a titillating sex scene…it meant bringing their vulnerabilities into the story.

    Read the draft aloud. The places where your voice goes flat or speeds up are the places where you have stopped trusting yourself. Go back to those passages. Slow down. What is really happening there?

    Don’t tidy up the ending. We are trained to want resolution—a lesson learned, a wound healed, a door closed. But life doesn’t always offer that, and neither does the most honest writing. Let the poem end where it ends, not where you wish it would.

    Readers, this is also something to look for in books you love: the sentence that makes you set the book down for a moment. Not because it is shocking, but because it is exactly right—because someone told the truth so precisely that it feels like your own.

    Anna M. Figueroa is the author of four works of poetry and literary fiction, including A Woman Full Grown and Intimate Strangers.

    Share

    Related Posts

    Join the Newsletter

    Occasional notes on new work, readings, and what I’m writing next.

  • Writing in Two Languages, Living Between Two Worlds

    Writing in Two Languages, Living Between Two Worlds

    On Bilingual Voice & Cuban Identity

    There are things I can say in Spanish that I have never been able to say in English. Not because English lacks the words—English is a vast and generous language, and I love it. But because some truths were formed in Spanish. They live in the cadence of a certain kind of sentence, in a sound that carries the memory of where it came from. To translate them would be to betray them.

    This is why Una Mujer en el Camino—my Spanish-language poetry collection—is not a translation of any other book I have written. It is its own world. The woman on the road in those poems could not exist in English. She walks differently. She carries different things.

    “Some truths refuse to cross the border of language.”

    The Gift and the Grief of Living Between Cultures

    I grew up shaped by Cuban roots and South Florida light—a particular mix of cultures that gives you access to two ways of seeing everything. Two sets of idioms for love. Two calendars of grief. Two languages for the divine.

    This is a gift that sometimes feels like a wound. You are never entirely inside one world or the other. You translate yourself constantly, across the dinner table, across the page, across the years.

    But writing has always been the place where I don’t have to choose. On the page, both languages are available. Both ways of being in the world are available. The poem can hold the contradiction without resolving it, because that’s what poems can do that conversations often can’t.

    For Aspiring Writers: Writing the Self You Brought with You

    Whether or not you write in two languages, many of us carry more than one world inside us. Here is what I have learned about how to bring that richness onto the page:

    Don’t explain your culture—inhabit it. The temptation, especially when writing for an audience that doesn’t share your background, is to translate everything. To footnote your life. But the best writing trusts the reader to follow. Use the specific word, the specific smell, the specific sound. Let the reader come to you.

    Write what only you can write. Your particular crossing—of cultures, of languages, of geographies—is not a limitation. It is the most original thing about your voice. The intersection you occupy is yours alone.

    Let the untranslatable stay untranslatable. In Una Mujer en el Camino, there are images and feelings that resist English equivalents. I let them stay in Spanish. There is power in refusing to fully cross over. It reminds the reader that some experiences remain irreducibly themselves.

    Honor your mother tongue—even if you write in another. The rhythms of a first language stay in the body. They shape the music of what you write, even in a second language. Trust that music.

    Readers, I invite you—whether or not you speak Spanish—to pick up Una Mujer en el Camino and let the sounds of the poems arrive before the meanings do. Poetry in another language is still an experience. Let it be one.

    Una Mujer en el Camino is available on Amazon through Anna’s website. For readings, book clubs, or speaking engagements, visit annamfigueroa.com/contact.