Remember Hurricane Irene? You know, the storm to top all storms a full year before Superstorm Sandy? Frankly there have been so many apocalyptic weather events since Irene and Sandy—well, they are all becoming a bit of a blur for me…
Publication News: “A Month of Sundays”
“A Month of Sundays” is a freewheeling, leaping, highly experimental poem that glories in sonics and sound. In it, I took the English names for every month of the calendar year, fractured them into syllables then refashioned them into the language used in a dozen quatrains, beginning and ending with the month of July. I remember it was fun to write
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Writing in Form: The Elegy
Grief. Sadness. Loss. All of these emotions lend themselves to expression in poetry even as we find ourselves desperately searching for words. Often such an occasion calls for the somber, elevated language of the elegy. This elegy has an important epigraph giving context as to the reason for this Buddhist funeral ceremony in northern Thailand of a dear, dear friend…
Published but Uncollected: “Sara’s Eyes”
Somewhere I know I still have the photograph, clipped from a New York Times print edition all those years ago, the years we were bombing men, women, and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For a while, it was pinned to the cork bulletin board above my writing desk in our house in the woods outside Corvallis, Oregon…
Poems Can Also Be Short!
My husband and I are avid gardeners. Every year, our community garden plot near the Woodlawn Elementary School is 400 square feet of asparagus, beets, carrots, delicata squash, leeks, peas, peppers, pole beans, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, green and yellow wax bush beans, and some years even zucchini. Often we grow heirloom varieties…
Publication News: Snail Mail Review
Snail Mail Review is a literary magazine that is/was print-only—on purpose. Its title tells its story. You submitted via U.S. mail, you got your response as to acceptance or rejection via U.S. mail, and the copy of the journal that had your poem in it arrived by—you guessed it—U.S. mail. I have no idea if these folks are still publishing…
Publication News: riverbabble 28
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 Issue. Every month, the Press also curated a reading series at the Spice Monkey Restaurant in Oakland, California…
Publication News: “Evidence, Occurrence”
This ekphrastic, free-verse poem was inspired by Dianne Kornberg’s photographs of kelp from the University of Washington’s marine algae Herbarium in her exhibit “evidence of its occurrence” at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, 2005…
Acceptance News: Poemeleon’s “Happy Poems” Issue
True confession right off the bat: I have not written very many happy poems. But I really like the literary journal, Poemeleon, and when the call came for their upcoming issue with a theme of “Happy Poems” well I searched the archives and dug a few out. Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry was founded by Cati Porter in December of 2005
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Publication News: Poeming Pigeon: In the News
After the shock of the November 2016 presidential election in the United States, things got very real very fast. The following year it often felt like the rat-a-tat of explosions perhaps even rapid gunfire—the cruel and verging-on-fascists nonsense that the administration started to spew. It was hard not to have the edginess of politics creep into the writing of poems
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