If you live in the New York City area, I am now teaching a weekly workshop at Brooklyn Poets (144 Montague St) on Tuesday evenings from 5–6pm! It’s part of their Weekly Drop-In Series and it costs $25 at the door, but less if you register in advance. If you become a member of Brooklyn [Read more]
Happy to announce that Button Poetry has agreed to publish an anthology of poems all “powered by Metaphor Dice,” which is tentatively titled “Poetry by Chance.” If you’ve ever written a poem you like which explores a metaphor you came up with while rolling the dice, please submit it to The Golden Die for consideration. [Read more]
Joint Taylor Mali on Zoom for an exploration of metaphor with poets, rappers, comedians, and other improvisational artists. Registration is required, but the cost of admission is only a donation. There is a limit of 100 people who can watch, and there will be opportunities for some of the audience to interact with the hosts [Read more]
This has nothing to do with my work as a poet or the business of poetry, but I need this to be somewhere on the internet, and it’s been a while since I have posted to my blog so here goes. About two years ago, a plastic bag got caught in the leafless branches of [Read more]
On March 21st I fled New York City with my wife and two children and headed for the old barn in Connecticut where I spent most of the weekends and summers of my childhood. What we thought would be only a week or two at most turned into 71 straight nights. That’s longer than I’d [Read more]
The poems is called “Bonfire Opera,” and you can read it here. Now here is the assignment: Write a poem of your own using “Bonfire Opera” as your template in which you tell the story of a curious member of your circle during a certain period in your life. Describe a specific instance of his [Read more]
That might be overstating the case a bit, but the main point is this: Metaphor Dice is now an official app for iOS available for $1.99 in the App Store! I don’t for a second regret developing the physical product first (“The world has enough apps,” as my friend Sarah told me at the beginning), [Read more]
Fans of the original set of Metaphor Dice, which I introduced to the world last year, will be excited to know that a Kickstarter campaign for the first expansion set, the ERUDITION EDITION, is underway for all of April! Please click the link below to support the new project. Take note that one way to [Read more]
This past weekend Saturday Night Live ran a really funny sketch called “Mr. H” starring James McAvoy, and it began with a quotation from my poem “What Teachers Make.” And they even used my name! I had no idea that this would happen in advance, nor do I have any idea how they came to [Read more]
Click here to pre-order! Parenthood and partnership dwell in Taylor Mali’s poems in addition to a “tender gloom” that comes from having lost a father years before finally becoming one, a late father. Mali’s signature playful eloquence and poignant observations are still at work here, but in these poems, Mali tells us, “all the smallest [Read more]
A little over two years after getting the idea for Metaphor Dice, I am happy to report they are now a real thing and available on Amazon! If you have a Prime membership, click here and get a set delivered to you for FREE! I have issues with Amazon just like everyone else, but ultimately [Read more]
A couple weeks ago I made a video on the roof of my apartment building here in Brooklyn in which my friend Jared Singer did what he does better than anyone else I know: improvise a poem on the spot. I had a bunch of Metaphor Dice in one hand and a baby strapped to my [Read more]
I had a wonderful chat with Jordan Rich on his Podcast “On the Mic.” Jordan was the emcee of a benefit reading I gave in mid-May, and I noticed then that he had a golden voice! Turns out he’s a local celebrity and has several radio shows in the Boston area with concomitant podcasts. We [Read more]
I’ve been trying to get Sharon Olds to take part in Page Meets Stage for over a decade, but apparently the secret trick was to use Ocean Vuong as bait because “I can’t say no to Ocean,” as Sharon confessed to me. The two will meet as part of Page Meets Stage on Sunday, October 28, [Read more]
The book is full of poems about becoming a father for the first time relatively late in life (I was almost 50 when my son was born) as well as poems about my own (late) father who passed away over ½ my life ago. Occasionally, the two themes come together in the same poem as [Read more]