KEEPING OUR SMALL BOAT AFLOAT So many blessings have been given to us During the first distribution of light, that we are Admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief. Don’t expect us to appreciate creation or to Avoid mistakes. Each of us is a latecomer To the earth, picking up wood for the fire. […]
Yearly Archives: 2021
“Where Will We Find Another Like Him? “ – Robert Bly (December 23rd, 1926 – November 21st, 2021)
November 28, 2021 – 9:33 pm
Where will we find another like him? Tony Hoagland from The Village Troublemaker: Robert Bly and American Poetry in The American Poetry Review, September/October, 2011 The Pistachio Nut God crouches at night over a single pistachio. The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child. […]
Moved By The Shape of Scars – A Poem and a Chapbook by Ghanaian Writer and Poet Tryphena Yeboah
October 14, 2021 – 6:08 pm
MY BODY, HAVING LEARNED RESURRECTION The day ripens on my face. The opening of my eyes is the plucking of stars and I want to keep the glistening thing forever but my hands, I need them empty to carry other dreams like pulling myself out of bed, washing my face and carving today’s date into […]
“The Dark Came Down” – R.I.P. Sophie Alexandra Musgrave Reid (1989-2021) – And Poems of Response by Her Mother, Canadian Poet, Susan Musgrave
September 30, 2021 – 3:30 pm
THE SOUL IS A TINY THING for Sophie The day you were born the sun thawed the tears on your father’s face. We needed you, a flirt of grace, your breath on our lips like one long kiss. We could have spent a lifetime together in that kiss. Today you are twenty-six. You send me […]
A Ten-Day Generative Poetry Writing Retreat in Umbria Italy – May 16th to May 26th, 2022
September 30, 2021 – 10:17 am
Poet as Diviner – Hunting the Pluck of Poetry An Invitation to a Ten-Day Generative Poetry Writing Retreat with poet Richard Osler and Paper-Arts Facilitator Terry-Ann Carter at La Romita School of Art, Terni, Umbria, Italy THE DIVINER Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick […]
In Spite of 9/11 and Other Catastrophes We Must Still Sing – A Reflection on Patrick Lane’s Poem – Small Elegy for New York
September 13, 2021 – 5:11 pm
Small Elegy for New York A small bird sings in the apple tree today where the fruit hangs heavy in the heat. The harvest is still weeks away. He sings to leaves to shelter him, that there be flowers, nests, and seeds, that the sky he knows will always be the sky. In New York […]
The Itinerant Sea-Sight Seeker Xiao Yue Shan – Two Ocean Shores (Japanese and Canadian) in Twenty Days – and now the Winner (Announced Today) of Tupelo Press’s 2021 Berkshire Prize
August 1, 2021 – 5:10 pm
I write poems…to say grace. Xiao Yue Shan from Minutes, Sea-Sight Journal Day Nineteen, June 29th, 2021 from her website shellyshan.com the ocean is a gateway, a gentleness that contains and understands rage. almost fata morgana. the water is the ink by which the story of the land may be written. memory that may be projected […]
Short-Listed for Canadian Griffin Prize Shortlist 2021 – Yusef Saadi – Words are His Pleasure
July 30, 2021 – 8:52 pm
Pleasuring Shahrazad In rosewater I rinse my final words, dip them into your body. Your slow, saline drip on my tongue. You eclipse Medinan dates soaked in honey, saffron rice with diced pistachios, a single pomegranate— surah carved in Kufic on each ruby seed. Camphor recites its being inside a kerosene lamp. Don’t plead, simply […]
What Will Not Let Me Forget – A Personal Story of a Poem and Synchronicity (Meaningful Coincidence)
July 29, 2021 – 4:23 pm
In a series of synchronistic events a poem I wrote has come back to me more than thirty years after I wrote it and almost twenty years since I had disavowed it and forgotten it! I had forgotten that a dear friend, Sarah Wilson, copied out the poem in her distinctive and wonderful script with […]
My Story – Transforming Anger into Action Close to Home – What To Do About “Unsustainable Logging”? How To Turn “Things or Objects” into Nouns We Care For?
June 12, 2021 – 5:12 pm
“If I choose not to become attached to nouns – a person, place or thing – then when I refuse a intimate’s love or hoard my spirit, when a known landscape is bought, sold and developed, chained or grazed to stubble, or a hawk is shot and hung by its feet on a barbed wire […]