Here’s where I’m offering my due regard.
This newsletter follows what it looks like to be a modern full-time poet committed to a slow, intentional, funny, and connected life. This is the life that I am striving to live — one rooted in observation and relationships.
In Irish, the root of the word poet is fili: one who sees. What we see — how we pay our attention — to whom we offer regard — composes who we are. At a time when so much is out of our control, this is something that is within it: where we are turning our thoughts toward. How we’re shining our own lights through the dark.
Consider Due Regards my own little candle. Or a lighthouse, perhaps. An attempt to reckon with what it means to be a woman, and a poet, and an artist in a world that doesn’t have much if its own regard for those ways of being. A way to tell you where I am putting my attention in a world where attention is our most valuable resource. Hopefully, a provoking and inspiring place for you to lend your own attention to.
I will do my best to honor your contribution.
Weekly Content
Due Regards releases once per week on a Saturday or Sunday morning in four different categories:
A how-to essay on different topics of living (often in the category of: annoying, difficult, surprising, or strange) based on trial and error experience
An observational essay that follows an intentional or impromptu artist date (plus ideas / assignments for your own artist dates)
My favorite poem of my own from the month, accompanied by a short reflection on how it came to be and writing prompts for you
A longhand letter written and mailed to a friend (sometimes, later, with an accompanying response). (And, maybe this goes without saying, but I hope these might inspire you to write a longhand letter to your own friend.)
My failures, artist dates, prompts for poetry and life, and friends are four enormous cornerstones of how I live as a poet. So, they too are the cornerstones of the newsletter.
Free Subscribers
Free subscribers have access to two of the four monthly pieces of writing. These will shift depending on the content and tone of each.
Paid Subscribers
Paid subscribers get all posts, plus a chat where you can share any writing you’ve done to the prompts I share. I also record myself reading all of my pieces just for paid subscribers, if you prefer to listen.
And, if you love to listen to poems / could use a good laugh, I also release a free weekly comedy / poetry podcast called Poking Around — available wherever you get your podcasts.
About Me
I’m Zoe, a full-time poet and artist based in New York City. Most of my living comes from writing on-the-spot poems for strangers on a typewriter — often in Central Park or at events across the country. I mean living here in both senses — how I make money, and also how I make a life.
Also, yes, that’s me and my great grandfather’s typewriter when I’m about eight years old. This has always been my life work.
Poetry, for me, is a way of being. The process of paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it — as Mary Oliver instructs — feels woven into everything I do. Naomi Shihab Nye tells her students: You are living in a poem. And we are. We just have to notice it.
Often, I am helping other people with the noticing — asking for prompts then responding to them on the spot. In this process, I hope to create little mirrors for people to see themselves in — and telescopes through which we can see each other. Writing poems for people has taught me that we are all so much more the same than we are different. And: that people need poems.
This is a space for me to write more about the living part of being a poet — not as I do it for others, but as I do it for myself. Here, I give my own prompts and respond to them. Maybe you would like to, as well. I hope my words can help us both live in a way where we pay our attention more tenderly — to the things we love, the things we’re curious about, and the people we hold dear.
with due regard to (idiom): with the proper care or concern for
regard (verb): to consider and appraise, usually from a particular point of view
regards (noun): best wishes — used to express friendliness in greetings, especially at the end of letters
due (adjective) satisfying or capable of satisfying a need, obligation, or duty
