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…
I’ve been thinking about my heart condition and looking at poems I wrote shortly after having a heart attack. Contemplating my mortality is a new thing for me. I’ve had to adjust my thinking about time and the future. It’s a subtle shift but a profound one to consider that my time to be, to write, and to love is limited. It’s unsettling in the most interesting way to think of the body as having…
I’ve been re-reading Emily Dickinson’s poems lately, one or two a day. Although her early editors removed her original groupings — the “fsaciles” or small booklets in which she grouped them — I enjoy the section “Nature” that groups together a major focus of her writing. Emily doesn’t write about nature as pretty or ornamental, though she certainly finds beauty and delight in it. But she writes more like a Zen monk, or like my…
I can’t help it. I’m a poet intoxicated in springtime, renewal and faith. Step aside, war and riot, prejudice run amok, mass shootings and atmospheric rivers, ignorance abroad and becoming endemic. Step aside, the ruin of the world — it’s like the ruin of winter. And I am a fervent believer in humanity and spring. Evrywhere, I find evidence to back up my faith. To celebrate (before the next bomb cyclone drops on our heads…
New Poetry February 2023 I seem to be writing more poetry in this new year. Lunar new year feels more like a fresh start than did January 1. Flexing my February 2023 without regard to form, publishing opportunities, or any of that. A form of journaling with line breaks and compression, if you will. A new year calls for new tunes. And haiku is returning in my reading hours, so I’m thinking sometimes with a…
I’ve finished a novel and will see it published on December 27 of this year. Attending to a lot of the homework of promoting a new book, I find myself yearning for a new long-form story, wading through many plot, character, and title ideas, and yet frozen as the leaves that remain on the trees in this wintry month. I can’t summon energy to write scenes and do plot outlines, so I fall back into…
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…
Our Broken World People talk a lot these days about the divisions in our country and our world. With good reason, they lament the brokenness we see among a large swath of the population, and the despair many feel that the “normal” world will never be regained. I have a different view. I come at this chaos with the idea that we are making a hairpin turn in civilization, and won’t be returning to “normal”.…
Sometimes speaking needs to be be done both plainly and in poetry. The essayist’s keyboard writes journalistically, but a poet’s pen tends to curve. It speaks truth aslant of literal meaning. It breaks into lines, cadges meaning from comparisons, and is known to divert utterance with entertaining rhythm or rhyme. I’m thinking about saying a thing with curves, speaking plainly in poetry. Uttering my truth in metaphor while making its essentials clear as glass. To…