Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
A while back now, Sugar Mule published one of my poems in their ongoing project called Via Walt Whitman: a 21st Century Gathering. It is an ode with one of those (hopefully necessary) long explanatory titles: “Ode to the Past & Present Wilt of the Daisy, Bellis perennis, Pressed in The Illustrated Leaves of Grass, a June 1973 Graduation Gift from L.” This poem later appeared in my chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, published by Burning River Press…
Two of my poems, “On Not Looking Away: A Cento” and “At Harriet Tubman’s Grave in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York,” have been accepted for publication in the Winter 2024 print edition of Fence. Per their website, “Fence is committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil all the systems that bring new writing to light.” You can read about their history here…
Below is the first poem I ever wrote in couplets aka two-line stanzas. The lines in my poem, “Leda before the Swan”, do not rhyme which means it immediately broke all of the usual couplet rules. Oh well. Couplets are traditionally lines of the same length bearing pairs of successive rhyming lines…
I spent most of this day in my green sanctuary. Away from the world. Hiding out. Holing up by choice. This, the day after the thirty-four guilty counts convicted as felon you-know-who. I weeded. I watered. I fertilized. I scrubbed more green algae from the dahlia fountain. I recycled. I re-planted. I watched birds—goldfinch, sparrows, the flicker—cheep and bounce and hop…
My cento, “Stoned-Soul Picnic,” has been published in Thriving An Anthology from Exolutas Press. The publisher, Rhonda Rosenheck, chose the topic and has collected poems that explore thriving in all its glory and forms, often in the aftermath of grave challenges.This poem takes its title from the 1968 song written by Laura Nyro and popularized by The Fifth Dimension…
It is always good to have a series of questions to ask the draft of a poem. Interrogating your work is, in my opinion, a key element of the necessary revision process. Thanks to Bob Haynes—an outstanding teacher I worked with in 2005 and 2006 via Writers on the Net—for the insights and wisdom that are below…
We are headed to Whidbey Island in Washington State on Thursday via Port Townsend. The Ioniq5 gets its first electric road trip test and then some! We will motor the Olympic Peninsula then travel by ferry to visit with dear friends after half a year of not much travel, health crises, assorted this and that. There will be a parade in Coupeville on Saturday I believe and we are going to march in it along with other volunteers who celebrate and promote the public library and all of its good works on that island. And I am going to sport my clear backpack full of books that far too many want to ban. Margaret Atwood. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Toni Morrison. George Orwell. The 1619 Project. Harper Lee. Toni Morrison again
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My syllabics poem, “The Green Love of the Progress to This Now and” has been published in Thriving An Anthology from Exolutas Press. The publisher, Rhonda Rosenheck, chose the topic and has collected poems that explore thriving in all its glory and forms, often in the aftermath of grave challenges…
After the shock of the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, oh so many of us felt upended, and at loose ends. A wise and deeply soulful friend encouraged me to do some soul searching and craft my personal inner stance, statements that could inspire and guide me when the waves got choppy, when the going got rough. I crafted my angst into words; time and time again during those turbulent years, I would steady myself by taking a look at my words. Speed ahead in time to find us eight years later and, amazingly, shockingly, horribly, things these days seem to be even worse.
The news just came over the wires—well, they are the bits and bytes, ones and zeroes, of the Internet these days I guess. Sometime last night, while I was winging my way back from a visit to my son in Burbank, California, Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel prizewinning master of the short story, died in a Port Hope, Ontario care home after nearly 93 years of a long and interesting life. …
