I’ve been making animated recordings of my poems — poem movies, if you will. I love listening to poetry, especially when read by the author. Adding visuals is fully engaging for me, so I’m using the program Canva to layer the text over moving backgrounds for a full poetry experience. Here’s my latest on Youtube — “I Get Over Myself”, a poem from my book The Artist’s House.
My new poetry collection. The Artist’s House is a cultural autobiography, honoring the literature, art, and artists that have shaped my writing, with illustrations and interactive features. It will include Art Nouveau style drawings and links to music, dance, and poetry online. Listen to a song by Jacob Collier while reading a poem about Emily Dickinson’s lines dueling with Taylor Swift’s. Watch a performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In The Upper Rooms” ballet after reading the…
Publishing My Poetry as a Practice Long ago, in a less digital world, I wrote things and sent them through the mailbox to a few print magazines to see if they wanted to publish them. I enclosed a self-address, stamped envelope (the old SASE — anyone remember that acronym?) and waited, often for months. Most of the time, my poems came back to me like homing pigeons in the old SASE, sometimes with an editor’s…
Clouds have always intrigued me. They’re like immense art murals on giant walls that you walk past every day without giving them thought. But I give them thought all the time. I try to decipher them. I take photos, hoping that later I can crack their mysterious code. I can’t help taking them personally, learning their names and causes. The evanescent formation mystify and grab me, as if they’re trying to say something to me.…
I exercised my way into a knee injury, and turned my writing life upside-down. That’s because I do a lot of dictating into my phone while walking. And now I’m not walking much. I also use stair-climbing as part of my thinking process. Doing chores in our house means stairs, and that’s some of my best thinking time. Though now I have more stair-thinking time, as I take it one step — good foot, bad…
Early in the pandemic, before a vaccine had been developed, when it seemed as though death stalked the streets, many of us poets wondered how to write at such a time. Whole cities had gone silent, absent of the normal traffic rushing from place to place. Work, shopping, worship, social life, dining out, going to movies — all suspended. We dared not go out exept to walk, masked, keeping carefully apart. I wondered how I…
I’m really happy that one of my most recently published poems was “Wings Clipped” and appeared in Issue 4 of a journal called Panoply. Several reasons: 1) I’ve had a panoply of acceptances this season — far more than my usual batting average! 2) “Wings Clipped” is the lead poem in my new manuscript, Arabesque (available to an interested publisher) and 3) the poem brings together the two art forms I’ve devoted myself to: dance…