I buy my white daughter a black doll and she cries and she sleeps and she rides through our kitchen in a pink stroller. She takes a tiny bottle in her pursed lips, and every night she takes a bubble bath. As my daughter drapes a washcloth across her brown shoulders and down her delicately […]
Category Archives: General
What’s at Stake These Days When Writing Poems that Might Offend And a Poem as an Example by Keetje Kuipers
July 27, 2019 – 3:13 pm
The Unexpected in the Overknown – Ada Limón’s Spring poem from “The Carrying”
April 2, 2019 – 7:50 pm
Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white […]
Reprise for National Poetry Month – The Ah! Ah! Genius of Jack Gilbert – Two Huge Small Poems – # 47 in a Series
April 1, 2019 – 10:09 pm
American Poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon What is the best we leave behind? Certainly love and form and ourselves. Surely those. But it is the mornings that are hard to relinquish, and music and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty piazzas in small towns flooded with sun. What we are busy […]
Absences Gone Through Me – R.I.P. W.S. Merwin and Patrick Lane – The Bigness of Small Poems – # 27 in a Series – Updated and Revised
March 15, 2019 – 10:59 pm
EARLY ONE SUMMER Years from now someone will come upon a layer of birds and not know what he is listening for these are the days when the beetles hurry through dry grass hiding pieces of light W.S. Merwin from Migration: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 What a great poem to celebrate […]
Beer-Label Poetry from Hoyne Brewing Co. in Victoria!
December 28, 2018 – 12:04 am
A Found Poem – Gratitude For people – For people who are naturally given to generosity, no matter their means. For industrious people who build things great and small and take pride in accomplishment. For people who try to do their best, but cannot. For people who only half believe their own stories. For people […]
More on Ursula K. Le Guin – Part One of a Two Part Series
July 29, 2018 – 1:07 pm
In class, she said, “We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Because they are numb. Because we have forgotten.” In class, she said, “We have forgotten our rituals. Out […]
The Silences That Move Us To Speak – Ilya Kaminsky’s Poetry
July 28, 2018 – 6:18 pm
Search Patrols I cover the eyes of Gena, 7, and Anushka, 2, as their father drops his trousers to be searched, and his flesh shakes, and around him: silence’s gross belly flaps. The crowd watches. The children watch us watch: soldiers drag the naked man up the staircase. I teach his children’s hands to make […]
A Poem for Andy – Waiting for Surgery on July 12th, 2018
July 10, 2018 – 10:34 pm
Waiting A sound so loud: a dry leaf falling. The ground littered with yellow silences. I walked here with you once, the Arbutus grove, their leaves dropping and their copper peeling, the new-skin green underneath. New skin. How many times dear Lord our new skin? Each green silence? Richard Osler, unpublished 2018 It is not […]
See You in Italy in October?
June 30, 2018 – 8:45 pm
I am pleased to announce that my October poetry retreat En Plein Air, in Umbria, Italy is a go! For details see above in Upcoming Events! I am also very happy to say we have a few spots left. If you have any interest please let me know asap!
Poems for the Summer Solstice – # 2 in a Series – W.S. Merwin
June 17, 2018 – 3:12 pm
Summer Be of this brightness dyed Whose unrecking fever Flings gold before it goes Into voids finally That have no measure. Bird-sleep, moonset, Island after island, Be of their hush On this tide that balance A time, for a time. Islands are not forever, Nor this light again, Tide-set, brief summer, Be of their secret […]