It’s almost a cliché by now: We use poetry to mark rites of passage, to commemorate profound and seismic societal events, to celebrate a life’s beginning, and to mark a life’s end. When my dear, dear friend LaVerne died on January 6, 2016,…
Publication News: The Dreamers Anthology
In 2019, the Beautiful Cadaver Project of Pittsburgh, Pennsyylvania put together an outstanding collection, The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jt. and Anne Frank; two of my poems, “Politics and the American Language” and “Still Birmingham” were published in it…
Party Time: Alice Munro Won the Nobel Prize!
So I was ecstatic when one of my favorite authors of forever won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. So I bought a cake from the legendary Helen Bernhard’s of Portland, Oregon. And, after that, wrote a poem. Because who does not love Alice’s stories and chocolate cake as well?…
Writing the Mind/Righting the Mind
Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado was founded in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a lineage holder of both the Kagyü and Nyingma Buddhist traditions…
Publication News: Posit
In April 2014, my surrealistic and wildly experimental poem, “Up in the Old Hotel,” was published in Posit. Posit is a journal of literature and art that “publishes a stimulating, dynamic selection of the finest new poetry, prose and visual art…
Quotable Quotes: Bob Dylan on New Orleans
This was printed in the International Herald Tribune in August 2005. It is taken from Bob Dylan’s book, Chronicles: Volume One, which I have read at least twice since I wrote this post.
“The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds—the cemeteries – and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here….
Poetry: Rumi for New Orleans
On this eighteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina destroying the singular city of New Orleans, I thought I would re-post something I wrote back in 2005 during the week that the hurricane was battering New Orleans and other Mississippi and Louisiana communities in that region…
She Holds the Face of the World: Ten Years of VoiceCatcher
Back in 2015, I was part of the editorial team that published the anthology, She Holds the Face of the World: Ten Years of VoiceCatcher. This 250-page print anthology featured a decade of the work of eighty-two writers from every print and online issue of VoiceCatcher,
Writing in Form: Syllabic Verse
In 2012, my short poem, “Winter in the Coast Range Foothills” was published in Clatsop Community College’s RAIN Magazine. This poem is an example of syllabic verse—poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line …
Finding Words for a Friend Nearing the End of Life
A beloved friend back in upstate New York just entered hospice a few weeks ago. She knew this was on the horizon. In early May, another friend and I visited with her at her home near the Finger Lakes National Forest…
