The Poetry after Li Po I found him wandering on the hill one hot blue afternoon. He looked as skinny as a nail, as pale-skinned as the moon; below the broad shade of his hat his face was cut with rain. Dear God, poor Du Fu, I thought: It’s the poetry again. Don Paterson (1963 […]
Category Archives: General
Gem of a Short Poem and a Hugely Long Blog Post – Thanks to British poet Don Paterson!!! And Canadian Novelist Guy Gavriel Kay! And Li Po and Du Fu!
December 13, 2019 – 6:55 pm
Not for the Faint of Heart – Francesca Bell’s Poems of the Merely Bad, the Really Bad and the Dreadful
November 21, 2019 – 3:12 am
Want Small wind tonight and my faced pressed to the flimsy screen. Owls ghost the hilltop trees, fledglings shrilling for food. They eat their own weight in rodents every night, and shriek although their sibling was found, consumed. Under their nest box, What was left: wings sheared intact From the torso, a few bones, Skull […]
Dealing with Rejection! – Two Different Responses – Mark Jarman and Francesca Bell
November 17, 2019 – 3:29 pm
from Unholy Sonnets # 34 Although I know God’s immensities can speak In sunlight’s parallels and intersections; although I know the spiritual technique For finding God in all things, when I pray It is to nothing manifest at all. And although I know it’s merely technical, I do not pray to nothing. Yesterday, one of […]
My Ten-Day Retreat in Italy in 2020 is Filling Up – But Places Still Available
November 13, 2019 – 6:41 pm
Hello! I wanted to send out this reminder of my poetry retreat in Italy next year before the early-bird pricing special of $2,880 US ()double occupancy) expires in two weeks. The price increases to $3,180 US December 1st. For more details and the retreat poster please click here. For further details and lots of pictures […]
Sex or Not – A Poem by Christine Gosnay
November 13, 2019 – 5:55 pm
Sex It is hard to make this choice when the room is so small and bright, and the outside big and deep. But I have not taught myself to lie on the earth and feel how much greater it is than me. And I can’t help following the sky with my eyes as it moves […]
My Next Generative Writing Retreat/Workshop – In Victoria November 3rd!
October 31, 2019 – 3:02 pm
So happy to be leading this writing time in Victoria this coming Sunday. One or two spots still available. This time will be ideally suited for men and women searching for ways to support their recovery from addiction. And also others who want to to recover their own hidden and waiting words. Who want to […]
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
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 […]
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 […]