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…
Publication News: PANK Magazine
In January 2012, my triptych poem series, “Distant Early Warnings,” was published online in PANK Magazine. According to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, a triptych is “a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together.” …
Pandemic Pastime: Renting a Movie Theater
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic back in 2020, Cinema 21, the independent movie house in Northwest Portland, Oregon came up with a creative way to generate cash and, hopefully, weather the months when the city had decreed none of us could gather together to watch a movie on the big screen. For $250, you could rent their Screen #1…
Publication News: Gold Man Review
In Fall 2014, two of my poems were published in the very excellent print journal, Gold Man Review out of Salem, Oregon: “An Elegy for Alice Who Called Out of the Blue on Her 54th Birthday in April 2010, Said She Was ‘Tying Up Loose Ends’ before Heading into a Period of Major Surgeries, and Died a Brief Eighteen Months Later of Complications from a Recurring Infection” and “And I will tell you a story.”..
Sharing the Floral Abundance
We are now edging into the last week of August. We just survived a stretch of record-breaking hot days and now the smoke has arrived. So many trees and perennials are suffering. But the dahlias are coming into their peak bloom and seem to be thriving! I am not sure if I ever formally decided to start growing a small urban “farm” of dahlias….
Odes of Opposition: A Collaborative Poetry Project
A while back, a poetry pal and I worked a collaborative project we christened Odes of Opposition. We wanted to copy the hand of the masters, those poetic stars fixed into the contemporary, literary discourse…
Writing in Form: The Double-Block
Several months ago, I was playing around with a form invented by the poet Jericho Brown called the duplex. I decided to modify his duplex into a form of my own that I christened the “double-block.”…
Publication News: Raven Chronicles
My poem, “Gift Event for Our New Gilded Age” appeared in the Celebration Issue of Raven Chronicles, A Journal of Art, Literature & The Spoken Word, Vol. 22, July 2016…
Found Poem: “Genesis, American Style”
In March 2019, Halfway Down the Stairs published my found poem, “Genesis, American Style,” in their All That Glitters edition of their quarterly magazine. The editors noted that this issue was a way to “explore our never-ending resistible urge to pour ourselves out”…
Writing in Form: The Sestina
In Summer 2012, my poem, a sestina called “The Winter We Lived in the Church & It Snowed Daily & The First Barrel of Crude Oil Traveled Successfully Through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,” was published in the Security Issue of Blood Orange Review. A sestina is six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet…
