Michelle Bitting

Michelle BittingMichelle Bitting is an American poet. She has been poet laureate of Pacific Palisades, California and teaches as part of California Poets in the Schools. We became close in the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University, and her life and writing continue to encourage me.

The Film-Poem

Poetry is both visual and auditory, which is why it so easily blends with other media. Songs and illustrated stories issue forth from prehistory. The twentieth-century coinage “concrete poetry” refers to the arrangement of words in print for visual impact, an art as old as printing itself. And spoken word and rap music explore the …

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Michelle Bitting’s Blue Laws

Friend and MFA classmate Michelle Bitting just published her first chapbook, Blue Laws, with Finishing Line Press. I have pored over Michelle’s poems-in-progress during workshop, but it was a very different experience to regard this outstanding collection of finished poems, carefully arranged. From the opening poem about her brother’s suicide, I was riveted. Michelle knows …

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