Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
Recently, I had some fun writing in a new-to-me poetry form called the fib. I am hardly a mathematics nerd—in fact radically far from it. But playing around with these constraints was actually fun. And I found it a useful way to uncover the gist and pith of a few old poems that needed significant revisiting and revising…
In December 2004, I was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship—specifically, the Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship for Literary Nonfiction. What an honor! Several months later, the 2004 class of recipients was fêted at a lovely ceremony at the Wieden + Kennedy offices…
It’s easy to find clarity and insight, to conjure up the best advice for oneself when looking back in time, isn’t it? What was once a mass of confusion, a morass of to-do lists and frenzied scramblings that seemed to be going nowhere…
My chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, was published by Burning River Press of Cleveland, Ohio in 2012. Chris Bowen, the editor, had a very interesting process for making his chapbooks stand out from the crowd. Each one included an introductory essay that talked about a bit about the “how” and the “why” that led to the writing of that particular group of poems. In my case, this collection was all about the place I grew up, the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania…..
“The Finger Lakes Region of New York is easy to find on a map. But is there something intangible here, a spirit that can touch the human heart? This anthology of poems from more than 100 authors includes the well established and those just commencing the poetic craft. You will find a wide variety of voices…
Anchor & Plume Press of Baton Rouge, Louisiana published my long poem, Great Hunger, as their first-ever “pocket book” on St. Patrick’s Day 2016. As part of the volume’s launch, I answered a few questions for Anchor & Plume editor, Amanda Mays. Below is an excerpt of our conversation….
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 website 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…
Found poetry takes words, phrases, and sometimes even entire passages from other sources and recasts them into what I like to think of as the literary equivalent of a collage. My found poem, “So now this autumn,” is made up of lines taken from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by…
In Summer 2015, my poem, “Faced with a Towering Stack of Rubbermaid Bins, the Lifelong Incunabulist Contemplates (Yet Again) How Best to Deal with Four Decades of Notebooks that Require Destruction before the (Inevitable) End” was published in the Disobedient issue of Poemeleon…
I am cranking my way through this outstanding biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. I have long been fascinated by Oppenheimer perhaps since I saw the footage in which he ominously…
