Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable. Pentameter means there are five of those in a line. You most likely known the sound of blank verse and don’t even know it. Recognize this?
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…
We are lucky to live in a city neighborhood that has alleys. An extensive network, sometimes overgrown, sometimes maintained, often a way to escape the noise of the street when out and about on a walk. Several years back, during the doldrum days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a gang of us worked with artist extraordinaire Jenny Joyce to paint a mural…
This bro/ligarch is definitely un-liked. A thousand people (maybe more) were calling out his evildoing and enabling down on South Macadam Avenue across from the Tesla dealership today. We joined them earlier and it was, overall, definitely cathartic…
Once again, a poetry manuscript of mine has made it close to getting the big prize—publication and money!—but not quite. Sigh. My poetry collection, Brief Campaigns of Sting and Sweet, got as far as semi-finalist for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Book Prize. These folks at Fence recently published a couple of my poems…
Today no money changed hands as far as I was concerned. I did not drive. I did not order anything online. I did not even patronize local businesses—that was yesterday. What did I do? Wash clothes using laundry detergent purchased many moons ago. Activated the big-gun leaf blower we inherited from my son to begin the annual ritual spring cleaning up of the mess that is our outside universe here in Western Oregon…
Tonight, I am finishing up a novel called Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey. Harvey won the latest Booker Prize for her excellent slim novel, Orbital. Last week I read a superb non-fiction book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; it shed new, compelling light on the 1955 lynching of the young Emmett Till…
Today was my first visit to the recently remodeled, newly reopened North Portland branch of the Multnomah County Library to return books I had finished reading, to pick up new ones waiting for me on the hold shelf. North Portland Library began as the North Albina Reading Room in 1909. The Jacobethan-style library was built in 1913 and renovated in 1999. The building closed in April 2023 for construction which included additional space to accommodate a new Black Cultural Center, updated technology, and new artwork…
My narrative poem about my great-grandmother, Charity Schaeffer Lamoureaux, was published in print in Passager a long, long time ag0—yikes, a dozen years past, in Spring 2012. Per their website, Passager (passage + passenger) is “a small, independent literary press whose mission is to publish the work of older writers, encourage the imagination in the later stages of life, and create beautiful and welcoming publications. Passager was born in Baltimore in 1990…
I was when fifty-four years old when I wrote this free-verse sorta/kinda sexy love poem, “My Bikini Goes to Goodwill.” I remember the day I was cleaning out closets and drawers to fill a box I would later drop off at the Corvallis Goodwill store. That was when I found the forgotten and quite skimpy, two-piece bikini…
I have been watching, for the first time, the film, The Battle of Algiers. Palme d’Or and vintage 1966. I started my viewing the night …
