When I think back on commencement addresses I have sat through I think of shiny, successful speakers urging the grads on to scale great heights and capture their dreams. After […]

Yesterday, fleece under my sports jacket, I sat in Montreal with a few thousand others in a gargantuan white tent and listened to the convocation address at McGill University’s Spring […]

FOR THE WOMAN WHO DANCED WITH THE ASHES OF HER SON Strange how beautiful when we are diaphanous, a bit of ripped muslin set against the sun, the wind soft […]

Every poem has an unconscious life…Our poems know more than we do. Read them as clues. Marie Howe, Venice, July 2014 That’s what poets do: they go to the places […]

Here are two more poems by Patrick Lane and Wendell Berry. Nothing scientific about the choices of poems. Just that these are poems I keep coming back to. Can’t let […]

In Part One of this post I discussed the striking similarities between two, in some aspects, very different poems by Wendell Berry ( A Poem On Hope) and Patrick Lane […]

In an introduction to a poetry reading a few years ago Wendell Berry was described as a human treasure. This teacher, farmer and prolific writer of  more than forty books […]

IOWA, JANUARY In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow. Over and over, he enters the furrow. Robert Hass (1941 – ) from Time and Materials, Ecco Press, […]

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Kelowna to see the celebrated Canadian poet Patrick Lane receive an Honourary Doctorate from UBC – Okanagan. I also was privileged […]

In January 2007 I was preparing to lead my first Recovering Words poetry writing workshop at The Orchard, a drug and alcohol recovery centre on Bowen Island, offshore West Vancouver. […]