It is not my style to openly confess my sins—of which I am fully aware there are plenty and then some and perennially good at …
Streams of Consciousness
Rivers I Have Known
Historic —
Susquehanna: River of origin, is there such a thing as a birth river, the river in the town where I grew up, the one that flooded the streets and left us homeless for a time, that summer before my high school senior year….
Back in the Literary Saddle…
After two weeks in the Finger Lakes region of central New York, tonight was a literary love-fest at The Waypost in North Portland. Six women reading their work with or without hipster-fresh-squeezed margaritas. The beat does, indeed, go on even when it is 71 degrees outside
…
Miss Scarlet makes it to finalist in a first book competition…
Miss Scarlet makes it to finalist in a first book competition a.k.a., yet again the bridesmaid, never the bride? Seriously, not at all a bad thing that my poetry manuscript, Miss Scarlet in the Library with a Rope, made it to finalist in the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award
…
A gathering of crows—socially-conscious art & words…
My poem, “Climate Change Primer I, Sunshine State Bellwether” was chosen by Gathering Crows to be showcased as part of their November 2013 multimedia exhibition, Unnatural Acts: Crimes Against Mother Nature…
Pushcart Prize Nomination!
Photo by Forest Wander Blood Orange Review nominated my sestina with the very long title (and liberal use of ampersands!) — “The Winter We Lived …
National Penmanship Day (January 23rd)
This in reponse to the Big Tent Poetry Prompt for this week. Yes, indeed, there is a holiday for any and everything. Too …
Year of the Rabbit in Poetry: The Selected Levis by Larry Levis
I spent the past week reading over 200 pages of poetry from all of Larry Levis’s volumes over the years. In 1996, Levis died of …
Marathon (Wo)man
I have spent an entire day, more or less, revising a single freaking poem. Okay, in my defense, it is one made up of multiple parts, one that attempts to tell a story, a narrative, in the persona of people in my coal mining hometown. In addition, I’ve had the gremlins that I am certain live inside the bowels of Microsoft Word erase styles, italics, epigraph fonts, etc. more than once this day of typing too many words. So more labor-intensive time sink there as well
…
Read, Revise, Read, Repeat
Take a measly little pone of a poem written, oh, seven or eight months back. One that’s been sitting, gathering moss, and that you’re certain is nothing not something. When you wake up, fresh, read it over again, and maybe again.
…
