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…
This was a week all about the sun. One way or another, millions of inhabitants on this geographic outpost of Planet Earth looked up, grew …
“A Month of Sundays” is a freewheeling, leaping, highly experimental poem that glories in sonics and sound. In it, I took the English names for every month of the calendar year, fractured them into syllables then refashioned them into the language used in a dozen quatrains, beginning and ending with the month of July. I remember it was fun to write
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For many years, I have grounded my creative writing work in my singular poetry aesthetic. Below is the gist and pith of it. My poetry is an attempt to exhume moments of revelation along this journey of a constant becoming. I write as part of my attempt to seek (a temporary and temporal) understanding of the peripatetic instants of this life. Through poetry, I hope to explore, excavate, celebrate, and, at times, resurrect. I want to cut to the chase, to the heart of the matter, even it means staring down grief and pain…
Grief. Sadness. Loss. All of these emotions lend themselves to expression in poetry even as we find ourselves desperately searching for words. Often such an occasion calls for the somber, elevated language of the elegy. This elegy has an important epigraph giving context as to the reason for this Buddhist funeral ceremony in northern Thailand of a dear, dear friend…
Somewhere I know I still have the photograph, clipped from a New York Times print edition all those years ago, the years we were bombing men, women, and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For a while, it was pinned to the cork bulletin board above my writing desk in our house in the woods outside Corvallis, Oregon…
So National Poetry Writing Month—shortened to the (to my mind) bizarre acronym NaPoWriMo—is almost upon us again. And, insane as this may be, I am …
My husband and I are avid gardeners. Every year, our community garden plot near the Woodlawn Elementary School is 400 square feet of asparagus, beets, carrots, delicata squash, leeks, peas, peppers, pole beans, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, green and yellow wax bush beans, and some years even zucchini. Often we grow heirloom varieties…
