I have too many purses. There, now you know too much about me. Character flaw: fashion hoarding. Too many scarves, too. And strings of pearls — that would need a whole other blog post. In celebration of flaws and how they can become houses, boats, toolkits, and other things, here is my poem. Coach Handbags should send me a freebie, don’t you think? –> Ode to My Purse The three French handbags came with lifetime…
GODS OF WATER AND AIR – A NEW DISCOUNT! A prose poem from the book, which I’m again discounting to $11.00 through February, for all of you who didn’t get one in December! Email me if you want one. Wild Ranunculas. This is how you mend, ounce by floating ounce. Each petal lights on the eye, and the five-fingered yellow flowers nod. A moving cloud scars the field in March wind’s bitter tea. Walking through…
I’m a huge fan of Cummings and his idiosyncratic experiments with feeling and language. Susan Cheever’s new bio of E. E. Cummings looks wonderful, including as it does the intimacy of a personal connection through her father’s friendship with him. Here’s an excerpt. Cummings won me when I first started reading him in high school, as so many did, given the accessibility of his poetry. How could I not be won by a poet who…
I received a great literary Christmas gift among many this year. This one was an offer to include in my daily writing practice an idea suggested by someone else, a launching pass (appropriate for a rocket kid). So today, having a minor stomach bug and needing to rest, I decided to try one and challenge a friend to join me. This is the prompt for December 26: You can see everything in the universe in…
At first I didn’t want to make one. Then I did. Then I really didn’t, once I started putting together a script for a video that was to be no more than two minutes long (plus or minus), and trying to figure out what kinds of images, and whether still or moving, and what the voiceover should be. I wrote a bad script, pulling pieces of poems into a narrative whole. It stank. Then I…
I’m happy today to have my poem, “On the Rocks, Cliffs, and Tidepools” up in the current issue of About Place, “a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.” My poem is in the current issue “The Future of Water,” alongside poems from Susan Terris, Alex Cigale, Alan Kleiman, Ann E. Michael, Jeff Gundy, and too many more to name. I’m happily…
Diane Lockward’s marvelous Blogalicious has an interesting exploration of Diane’s poem about a bumblebee, and how Adele Kenny blogged about it and it found its way into an Italian translation. Diane even has a movie of the poem. I love it when poems transmogrify into other things — videos, illustrations to an illustration, and increasingly little animated movies. Speaking of Adele Kenny, her blog has an intriguing poetry prompt today about towns and home. And…