Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Arts & Culture”
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…
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. …
There are numerous ways to bring the art of the voice into poetry. We speak. We converse. We inhabit personas and personalities. We wail. We squawk. We squeal. We complain. We rant, rave, and react. We sound off with authority and verve. We simply and merely utter. And this is all the part of the notion of poetic voice. And in all of these varied utterances, we instinctively inhabit multiple registers of diction—high, middle, and low according to the late poet Tony Hoagland (with Kay Cosgrove) in his short, sweet, and very smart book of essays, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice…
How do you survive an Arctic snow and ice and blowing wind and wind chill event in the normally benign climate of the Pacific Northwest? By listening to the new, awesome podcast, Legend: The Joni Mitchell Story on BBC 4 radio who has done it once it again in the realm of musical explorations. I absolutely adore their series…
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…
In July 2021, during the ongoing days of the COVID nightmare, a group of us, under the direction of artist extraordinaire Jenny Joyce painted a mural on the side of our garage that faces the alley. I had seen and admired one a few blocks away in the alley that leads to the chickens all of us were so happy to feed during the early days of the pandemic. …
It has been several days since we went to see Killers of the Flower Moon at the historic Hollywood Theater where the big screen did justice to the gorgeous sweep of Oklahoma landscapes as well as the film’s more intimate, human moments. I am still reflecting on this latest film from Martin Scorsese and his top-of-their game film-making team…
My poem, “Revolutions per Minute” appeared in the Soundtracks Issue of Raven Chronicles, A Journal of Art, Literature & The Spoken Word in September 2014. The Raven Chronicle Press is a nonprofit independent publishing press and literary organization, established in Seattle in 1991…
Was having my Letter to the Editor published in the esteemed Poetry Magazine back in 2008. Here is the brief text: Dear Editor,
As I wound my way through Eavan Boland’s “Islands Apart: A Notebook” [May 2008], in which she writes of the increasingly skill-based nature of poets, I was surprised to find this:…
Went to see the A24 re-do of the 1983 Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense matinee at the 1936 Kiggins Theatre in downtown Vancouver, Washington earlier today. I was twenty-seven years old when I first saw this Jonathan Demme film; my now middle-aged son was all of six years old…
