A few months back, I entered the Fall 2025 Adult Contest of the Oregon Poetry Association. One of the categories this time was called Extended Prompt. The rules were one page and one poem maximum in any form following the prompt, “Turning Point.” The judge, Richard Tillinghast, provided some additional guidance: “Write a poem about a turning point in your life, a landmark event or life-choice. Something—
good or bad—has happened that changes everything.”
This afternoon we made our annual pilgrimage to Canby, Oregon—an hour or so south of Portland near the Willamette River—to see the forty-plus acres of dahlias in peak bloom at Swan Island Dahlias. Every August and September, they open their fields to visitors—there are food carts, music, fresh-cut bouquets, and general festivities all around for the attendees. Sunday afternoon was no exception as we lucked into a performance by the Salem-area blues band, Hank Shreve…
I have been thinking lately about the myriad ways one can construct a poem in multiple parts. I did exactly that when I wrote Great Hunger, my multi-part poem investigating the intersection of landscape and place as it relates to one ecological and humanitarian disaster, the mid-19th century Irish potato famine that was published by Anchor & Plume Press in Baton Rouge, Louisiana…
Two of my poems “A Baffling Earth” and “It Ends, It Begins: A Cento” are now online in the lovely September 2025 edition of the literary magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs. The theme of this issue is “Muse” in honor of their twentieth anniversary. In modern usage, a muse is a person who serves as a source of artistic inspiration. Recently, I did a number of poems that are “in conversation” with Emily Dickinson and her work; I guess that makes her my 21st century muse. And the cento form itself is a bit of collage/homage to the voices of other poets who inspired me as well. …
Been on a bit of a road trip involving ferries, Electrify America charging stations, and quirky museums of local interest and then some. Navigating the two-lanes through the Olympic Peninsula rain forests, the Whidbey Island estuaries and driftwood bird sanctuaries, and now, tonight, the fog-bound Washington coast where Grays Harbor meets the Pacific Ocean and flocks of pelicans are careening overhead. The cars downtown in this coastal marina…
My poem, “A Long Way Around,” has been accepted for publication in American Writers Review 2025, a publication of San Fedele Press. This year’s collection has the theme of “Buyer’s Remorse.” This poem is in a form called a golden shovel in which the last word of each line is made from each word of pre-existing poem to which the poet is paying homage. It was created by Terrance Hayes whose 2010 poem
…
We could all use a shot of delight and beauty right about now, early September in this year of ascendant authoritarianism 2025. So I present a truly glorious, curious flower, G. callianthus, the Abyssinian gladiolus first discovered and cultivated in 1888, the years when Reconstruction had been decisively defeated and abandoned after the U.S. Civil War…
The days grow shorter. The brutal heat comes and goes and comes right back again it seems. The backyard habitat plants that are used to their cool, their shadows and shade, now scald and shrivel and brown. The birds and the bees are gluttons for the many water options we have scattered about. We near the end of August and the state of this union on this precarious planet feels more uncertain, more fraught than ever before it seems. I do not think I have being hyperbolic when National Guard…
My syllabics poem, “Another Catalog of the Ending,” was featured as the poem of the day on August 22, 2025 online at Second Coming. Second Coming is a poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his fascist regime and is edited by Michael Broder. Second Coming is a project of Indolent Books
Here is my (mostly accurate) running life list of my published writing—print and online—in descending chronological order of the year of publication. Sadly, a number of these journals, magazines, and websites are no longer publishing—the fate of so much literary these takes of screen supremacy over words. Still, gratitude to all the venues who continue to put the word out there. Even when the odds (and finances) are against success…
