It is always good to have a series of questions to ask the draft of a poem. Interrogating your work is, in my opinion, a key element of the necessary revision process. Thanks to Bob Haynes—an outstanding teacher I worked with in 2005 and 2006 via Writers on the Net—for the insights and wisdom that are below…
We are headed to Whidbey Island in Washington State on Thursday via Port Townsend. The Ioniq5 gets its first electric road trip test and then some! We will motor the Olympic Peninsula then travel by ferry to visit with dear friends after half a year of not much travel, health crises, assorted this and that. There will be a parade in Coupeville on Saturday I believe and we are going to march in it along with other volunteers who celebrate and promote the public library and all of its good works on that island. And I am going to sport my clear backpack full of books that far too many want to ban. Margaret Atwood. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Toni Morrison. George Orwell. The 1619 Project. Harper Lee. Toni Morrison again
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My syllabics poem, “The Green Love of the Progress to This Now and” has been published in Thriving An Anthology from Exolutas Press. The publisher, Rhonda Rosenheck, chose the topic and has collected poems that explore thriving in all its glory and forms, often in the aftermath of grave challenges…
After the shock of the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, oh so many of us felt upended, and at loose ends. A wise and deeply soulful friend encouraged me to do some soul searching and craft my personal inner stance, statements that could inspire and guide me when the waves got choppy, when the going got rough. I crafted my angst into words; time and time again during those turbulent years, I would steady myself by taking a look at my words. Speed ahead in time to find us eight years later and, amazingly, shockingly, horribly, things these days seem to be even worse.
The news just came over the wires—well, they are the bits and bytes, ones and zeroes, of the Internet these days I guess. Sometime last night, while I was winging my way back from a visit to my son in Burbank, California, Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel prizewinning master of the short story, died in a Port Hope, Ontario care home after nearly 93 years of a long and interesting life. …
My rambling, stream-of-consciousness, mostly autobiographical exploration of a day in the life alongside a memory of a difficult time and the symbolism of a shower of visiting ladybugs is entitled “Fly. Away. Home.” It appeared in in the second issue of Scintilla…
I started my creative writing journey in the wilds of prose, specifically fiction. My SUNY-Binghamton graduate school classes concentrated on fiction; my master’s thesis was a novel-in-progress. Even when I started making the shift to writing more poetry, I still dabbled in the prose poem—it felt familiar and doable to me. According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is “a prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.”
In Fall 2012, I volunteered to be the judge for the New Poets category of the Oregon Poetry Association (OPA) contests. The OPA definition of a new poet is someone with no more than two poems published in print or online journals. Anything self-published or posted on a personal website or blog also counts as published…
Remember Hurricane Irene? You know, the storm to top all storms a full year before Superstorm Sandy? Frankly there have been so many apocalyptic weather events since Irene and Sandy—well, they are all becoming a bit of a blur for me…
There are numerous ways to bring the art of the voice into poetry. We speak. We converse. We inhabit personas and personalities. We wail. We squawk. We squeal. We complain. We rant, rave, and react. We sound off with authority and verve. We simply and merely utter. And this is all the part of the notion of poetic voice. And in all of these varied utterances, we instinctively inhabit multiple registers of diction—high, middle, and low according to the late poet Tony Hoagland (with Kay Cosgrove) in his short, sweet, and very smart book of essays, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice…
