Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Writing”
My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been accepted for publication in the fourteenth issue of The Poeming Pigeon in Fall 2024. This is one of forty-seven centos that make up my unpublished book manuscript, I Am Speechless: A Book of Centos. It is also included in my manuscript, Brief Campaigns of Sting and Sweet, currently making the rounds of assorted poetry book contests…
End of the holiday season so swiftly upon us. Ornaments wrapped, stored in the growing inventory of empty Garrett’s popcorn cans. Glass icicles removed, laid to rest in a metal, candy-caned tin tied with a sateen bow. Strings of red beads, garland, back in their indigo blue box. Light strings unclipped and tied with twine until needed again next year…
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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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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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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