Miriam Calleja
Winter 2026 | Prose
Poems Talking to Poems edited by Jeffrey Levine and Kristina Marie Darling. (Tupelo Press). 2025.
Face-to-face conversation is an art that is being slowly lost. There isn’t a replacement for the randomness of it. We are lucky to live in a world where we can talk to people and see their faces even if they are on the other side of the world. We can text all day if we want to. Most people have access to this relatively low-cost service, and virtual schools make education more accessible as well.
Yet, nothing can emulate the organic nature and power of being in a room with someone and giving them your full attention. And then, when writers are in deep conversation, when they spend time together, there’s the potential for magic. Ideas, plans for projects, breakthroughs, innovation, you never know what might happen when two creative brains casually meet over coffee.
Poems Talking to Poems is edited by two of Tupelo Press’ editors, Jerry Levine and Kristina Marie Darling. Levine and Darling, along with other members of staff, run online manuscript conferences that are essentially intense labs aimed at helping you choose the poems that fit in your manuscript. During the consecutive days, you are taught how to look at the narrative of your manuscript in different ways, and this forces you to think deeply about your options and themes. When I attended, I found this extremely useful in shaping my chapbook and clarifying which poems needed to go.
The mark this book left on me is that of having had a series of these conversations with some writers whom I really admire. It has this post-conference vibe—picking up snippets from panels, book fair tables, interviews, readings, and late-night performances.
Spreading the word about the manuscript conferences seems to be the book's low-key agenda. One that I am ready to totally forgive because of my experience with it, but also because I understand how generous it is to offer this advice in essay form. Aside from Levine and Darling, who respectively have five and four essays in the collection, we also hear from Ilya Kaminsky, Cassandra Cleghorn, Katie Farris, and Lisa Goett.
Jeffrey Levine gives sound advice, in a no-nonsense way. He reminds us that what we are doing isn’t fluffy. That we should take ourselves seriously and be organized about it; that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to poetry and what you can do with your work and creativity. A point I wholeheartedly agree with and pass on to my students.
I was impressed that in “An Exercise for Sequencing Full-Length Poetry Manuscripts: Three Different Sequencing Techniques,” Levine gives away some of what goes on during the Manuscript Conferences. In the last essay, he also gives us a Q&A from behind the scenes at Tupelo Press, a press that publishes some of the best contemporary poets. And although each press will work in a different way, it is helpful to understand what standards are deemed important by this particular team.
Those of you who have encountered Darling in some capacity will know that she is a powerhouse. I often recommend her work to friends and students. Her advice is always abundant, and these essays don’t fall short. You could take one, let’s say “Hybrid Genre Writing: An Introduction,” and continue to work/learn from the examples, quotes, and websites she offers.
Readers will be able to tell that she loves writing genuinely and writes without an agenda because of the way she studies other texts and other writers. She invites us to gain inspiration and motivation from the creativity that is available to us, again citing copious examples to further our study of the subject. I love how this essay breaks down traditional genres and how they overlap and intersect, including a diagram for those of us who learn best through visual learning.
Ilya Kaminsky offers an amuse-bouche that hints at deeper study and reflection. His essay, one of a sensitive reader and poet, invites us to search beyond its confines.
Having worked with various clients over the years, I have learned that writers are very different from one another in their structure and motivation. An essay like Lisa Goett’s “What My Mother Taught Me: Practical and Impractical Advice for the Poet on the Making of a Poetry Manuscript,” has me eating out of its lap. And you will too if you are the sort of person who needs guidance but also needs to rebel and be impractical in how they come to their result.
In “The Art of Stumbling Upon,” Cassandra Cleghorn writes, “I invite you to consider manuscript making as a profound opportunity to hone the art of stumbling upon. As I see it, our task in making a book is to open ourselves to the possibility that the book we set out to write is somewhere to the side of the book we will end up making.” To my delight, her essay connects directly to Kathy Fagan’s “World-Building Your Poetry Manuscript,” which harks back to the book's title.
Fagan lets us in on her trajectory not only with one manuscript but with several, giving us a firsthand account of how things happen between living life, happenstance, opportunity, and the keen observation of a poet. How delightful it is to enter another mind’s rabbit holes, knowing that they end in the successful production of a manuscript.
In “Building from the Ground Up: Writing the Hybrid-Form Manuscript,” Katie Farris offers us a study of a number of greats succeeding in their divergences from the norm. She said that “(A)rguably, any book is a subjective experience, created as a partnership between writer and reader.”
I love being able to dip into Poems Talking to Poems for guidance and camaraderie, for different voices, and just the right amount of play. As Darling adds, “The careful architecture of a poem—a space that is gradually illuminated for the reader—depends upon all that is hidden as a necessary condition, much more so than on the visible beauty or significance of a particular image.”
Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Rumor of Cortez, and Mortal, Everlasting. His many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize, and the American Literary Review poetry prize. His poems have garnered twenty-one Pushcart nominations. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, artistic director, and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic NORAD Mill in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. She has held academic appointments at Universidade do Porto, the European Law and Governance School, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the American Research Center in Sofia, and the Leysin American School in Switzerland. A prolific public speaker with the Ovation Agency, Dr. Darling has also lectured at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, the University of Cyprus, The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European MFA Program, and Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland Campus, where she leads a biannual writing workshop for diplomats. Additionally, Dr. Darling has served on fellowship juries for the United States Fulbright Commission, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and many other awards in the United States and abroad. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Alicante, and the Amalfi Coast.
Miriam Calleja is a poet, workshop leader, editor, artist, creativity expert, and translator. She speaks English, Maltese, and Italian. Her work has appeared in Taos, Plume, Humana Obscura, and elsewhere. Her full poetry collections are Pomegranate Heart (EDE Books, 2015) and Inside (EDE Books, 2016). Her poetry chapbooks are Remember (Stamparija Reljic, 2020), Stranger Intimacy (Stamparija Reljic, 2020), and Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence (BottleCap Press, 2023); her book of poetry translated from Maltese is Variations on Silence (PoetryWala, 2025). Miriam is the winner of the table // FEAST 2025 translation competition. She was also the 2025 Artist-in-Residence for the Mobile Medical Museum. Miriam is from Malta and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Read more on miriamcalleja.com.