"I remember standing on the beach as a kid and thinking that the rope used to tie the boat to the dock looked like a girl’s un-kept braid. It’s not a very original metaphor or anything, but it was a moment of realization for me. It changed the way I looked at the world and the way I searched for meaning in image. I used to take notes in my biology and chemistry classes in high school and try to find interesting metaphors or images to use in poems. All of that information was useful and interesting to me, but not in the way that I could apply it to science. I wanted to apply it to metaphor..."

"It often feels like I’m writing from a memory, or at least a vague, remembered mood. Sometimes these are actual memories; sometimes I mistake something imagined for a memory. In both cases, sight and texture are very much present, but sound usually isn’t. But it’s the auditory, it seems, that can contain the most mystery. Hear that wind outside? Rather, hear those leaves rustling because of the wind? Or was it something else altogether rustling the leaves?"

"I felt stifled as long as I believed I was limited by the written medium, but I don’t feel limited by medium anymore. Text is bigger than the written word. There are texts around us and in us if we are open to seeing them. Additionally, our negative limitations are generally self-and-culture inflicted. My work is, in part, about making negative narratives visible, like a scarlet A written upon a woman’s body in invisible ink, in order that we might no longer go around blindly bound to them. And then to create new texts we can later destroy when they no longer serve..."

"I think each format has more impact on an audience’s experience rather than on the work itself. Recently, I was considering format in relation to film viewing; how Casablanca is Casablanca, whether it’s viewed on 35mm film in a theater (perhaps a more ‘social’ scene?), or at home (with others or alone) on broadcast television, a VHS or DVD (rented at a store, or online, or purchased), or streamed. What changes is the viewer’s experience of that content, their place within that variability of connection. Perhaps there’s challenge or, rather, opportunity to make each experience unique, in whatever medium..."

Chapvelope Three features a chapbook of poems-in-translation from Lan Lan & Yi Lu (translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain), a series of flashcard-broadsides by Heather Christle, and Polly Duff Bresnick's eye-rhyme translation of Homer's Odyssey.

The Red Pen Project was a collaborative poetic evolution undertaken in Chicago during the AWP Conference, 2012. What began as William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 55" became an ongoing production of new poems. Participants replaced words, pasting over them with a piece of fresh paper and writing a new word in red pen. The final poem, "Bonkers 55" by Loretta Scodspear, reflects the combined poetics, aesthetics, humor, and politics of the participating writers. Here, we present both the beginning and ending poems as well as a photographic retrospective of the three day long evolution of the poem.

Is 2011 really almost over? It's easy over here at The Offending Adam to lose track of the time, our minds focused on preparing each week's content. But here we are at the end of November, which means Pushcart Prize nominations time. Making these selections is difficult, as our intimate relationship with each piece we publish makes us want to nominate pretty much everything. We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank all our contributors this year, who have made our second year of publishing a huge success. And, in particular, we would like to thank our Pushcart Prize nominees Jaswinder Bolina, Randall Horton, Amorak Huey, Lauren Ireland, Keetje Kuipers, and Johnathon Williams for sharing their remarkable work with us and our readers. We invite you to read or re-read their poems, and we hope that you find them as engaging and uncommon as we did.

In “Signs of Being: A Chamoru Spritual Journey,” acclaimed Chamoru writer Cecilia “Lee” Perez writes: “I always come back to the idea of cultural survival. We are here. We are now. But what is it that brought us, as a people, to this point? Despite years of governance by colonial powers, our language and our ways persevere. We are not pickled, preserved, or frozen in time. We are not measurable or validated by blood quantum, ethnic breakdown, physical characteristics or DNA. We are vital, and vitalized by our tenacity and joined inner strength." Join us this week as guest editor Craig Santos Perez presents a contemporary Chamoru poet each day this week, Monday through Thursday.

This conversation with Mark Irwin emanated from a re-reading and discussion of his essay “Poetry and Memorability,” which is part of this week’s issue. Memorability is an aspect of poetry that has guided Irwin’s own writing career as well as his teaching career. Books and works of art are chosen to populate a syllabus based on their memorability rather than their popularity or hipness or critical “depth.” Workshops are run with the central question: What will we remember from this poem? If all of this sounds like mulling over the eternal quality of poetry, then that is probably a correct assumption. It is our hope that the following questions expand upon and elucidate concepts and claims made in “Poetry and Memorability.”