What could be better than to take the exit for Brooks, Oregon just north of Salem and went your way on a two-lane road to bear witness to dozens of acres of peonies almost at the peak of their springtime bloom? That is what we managed to find the time to do on our drive back from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon a week or so ago
…
Something to crow about and then some. My short poem, “At Harriet Tubman’s Grave in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York” is appearing in the print issue of Fence 42, Winter 2025—in the mail soon!…
Several years back, my poem, “One June Day: Fire, Heat, & Children Locked in Cages at the Texas-Mexico Border,” was published at the poem of the day online at What Rough Beast on November 30, 2018. Edited by Michael Broder, What Rough Beast was a daily poetry site attempting to chronicle the travesties of the first (accidental) Trump administration…
Spring with all of its blooming and blossoming is a good time of year to learn how to see the world anew again. About a month ago, I had cataracts removed from both of my eyes. Since then, I not only have extraordinary distance vision for the first time almost sixty years but the world seems somehow brighter than ever. Throughout the day, I find myself startled…
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable. Pentameter means there are five of those in a line. You most likely known the sound of blank verse and don’t even know it. Recognize this?
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…
We are lucky to live in a city neighborhood that has alleys. An extensive network, sometimes overgrown, sometimes maintained, often a way to escape the noise of the street when out and about on a walk. Several years back, during the doldrum days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a gang of us worked with artist extraordinaire Jenny Joyce to paint a mural…
This bro/ligarch is definitely un-liked. A thousand people (maybe more) were calling out his evildoing and enabling down on South Macadam Avenue across from the Tesla dealership today. We joined them earlier and it was, overall, definitely cathartic…
Once again, a poetry manuscript of mine has made it close to getting the big prize—publication and money!—but not quite. Sigh. My poetry collection, Brief Campaigns of Sting and Sweet, got as far as semi-finalist for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Book Prize. These folks at Fence recently published a couple of my poems…
Today no money changed hands as far as I was concerned. I did not drive. I did not order anything online. I did not even patronize local businesses—that was yesterday. What did I do? Wash clothes using laundry detergent purchased many moons ago. Activated the big-gun leaf blower we inherited from my son to begin the annual ritual spring cleaning up of the mess that is our outside universe here in Western Oregon…
Tonight, I am finishing up a novel called Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey. Harvey won the latest Booker Prize for her excellent slim novel, Orbital. Last week I read a superb non-fiction book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; it shed new, compelling light on the 1955 lynching of the young Emmett Till…
