Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
In the summer of 2022, I started to read Heather Clark’s acclaimed new biography, Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Seven pages into the first chapter entitled “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” we learn that not only is there a multi-generational history of mental illness in Plath’s family but, unknown to her, her paternal grandmother, Ernestine, was committed to the Salem asylum by her husband, Theodore, in October 1916…
Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice…
My poem, “Ernestine” is included in these fine pages. I wrote this poem for the late Sylvia Plath after I went to visit a memorial in Salem, Oregon in early 2023. The cremains of Ernestine Kottke Plath, Sylvia Plath’s grandmother, were in a canister marked #177 (out of a total of 3423) at the Oregon State Hospital from her death in 1919…
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White-gray afternoon, waning days of December, heading toward the end of 2023. Light rain for the next hour, tapering off to a slight drizzle. Every now and then, the wind stirs and the branches of the Japanese maple as well as the slowly bronzing leaves of snow-leaf hydrangea in our front yard garden have their turns at being riled up. At Leadbetter State Park, hiking on Tuesday…
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The maple leaves were already falling in our backyard habitat when I decided it was time to read another big biography. This one is W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868—1919 by David Levering Lewis. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994. And actually this volume is only Part 1 of this bio; Part 2 (another chubby tome) also won the Pulitzer Prize…
I started to work on what’s below way back in the Stone Age, 2007. Some writing exercise that I just did without my usual scrutiny and questioning. I stumbled on it a year later on a Saturday morning while sipping coffee as we readied to start another outside gardening day. Looking at it again today, dateline December 2023, …
My poem, “The Cat Lady” was published in Stirring in January 2012. My beloved, half-Siamese creatures—Balthazar, Ping, and Ryman have long traveled over the rainbow bridge…
The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish. When the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten
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I wake to rain. I am on my hands and worthless knees. I pry and pare back twinflower leaves, free the groundcovers: kinnick-kinnick, thimbleberry, and native wintergreen. Dig and prune. Command the dahlias to grow aligned with their bamboo stakes. My fingernails are crescents of dirt. All I care is to breathe, hidden beneath the reach and lean of these tall, tall western Oregon trees. Last night in the rain, the emperor gong rang…
A number of years ago—maybe eight or nine now! 2014?—I entertained myself greatly with a poetry book project I called Miss Scarlet in the Library with a Rope, a celebration of the wonder that is the book. This collection grew to become a gathering of poems whose predominant constraint is that they were all “prompted” by book titles from prose authors I had loved and read voraciously over the years
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