A number of years ago—maybe eight or nine now! 2014?—I entertained myself greatly with a poetry book project I called Miss Scarlet in the Library with a Rope, a celebration of the wonder that is the book. This collection grew to become a gathering of poems whose predominant constraint is that they were all “prompted” by book titles from prose authors I had loved and read voraciously over the years
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I have a good number of poems that were published online or in print and then never found their way for some reason or another into my various poetry book collections. Here is one I have always liked because it speaks to the strangeness of growing up where I did—the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania
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Several years back, in the pre-pandemic Before Times, I had the good fortune to work with Dana Levin, a talented poet and extraordinary teacher, during several July sessions I attended at the Port Townsend Writers Conference…
Qarrtsiluni published my poem, “I started near the far north. Ran.” in their Fragments issue back in 2012. Their call for submissions requested “in the wild” creations more than overly crafted pieces so that’s what I sent in!
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There is a spectacularly bright full moon out there on this chilly, late November night. Yesterday, I cut the final dahlias blooms of the season. They were looking a little ragged after a few nights of just-around-freezing temperatures and cold wind. Then I tackled the plants with my new, awesome Felco secateurs—they made swift work of stems and stalks
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When you are someone who writes or aspires to write, I think reading means not just enjoyment but also study. It means seeking to understand all the nuts and bolts about the way a piece of writing is put together and then ticks…
A beloved friend left this world today. She had been in hospice for about six months. I am grateful I was able to visit with her back in May. Another friend and I went to her home near the Finger Lakes National Forest in Burdett, New York and spent an afternoon telling stories, laughing, and reminiscing. It was an afternoon of grace
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There was a frost last week in and around the Northeast Portland neighborhood where we live, a couple of miles up the hill from the Columbia River. But somehow the dahlias survived here in our micro-climate that only got to a low of 33 degrees F. I walked by other gardens where their dahlia leaves are now blackened, their unspent blooms still knobby and unopened on their stems…
I can’t remember how I came up with the title of this poem. Perhaps I wanted to invoke the notion in Christian theology about the conversion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ into homely bread and wine. In a poem about suicide—specifically death by hanging—why would I have dared to invoke the Eucharist at all…
Often the wisdom arrives in the simplest of packages and seems like it was there (and obvious) all along
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