I read the other day about the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the duel in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and Burr politically ruined. This tragedy is a bit of a mystery. No one can say why, at some point, they didn’t withdraw from the duel. But I have a good guess. …
I’m having to give a standardized test over material none of us have covered. The test is over the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and I’ve just covered Caesar Augustus. What makes me sad — or one thing that makes me sad — is Miss Willis. One kid says, “You hate this as much as we …
One of the great things about being a blogger is that you can shine a little light on work you admire. Today I’m going to direct a fat beam on two very different poets, John Rybicki and Louie Skipper. Rybicki’s poetry is new to me but I have followed Skipper’s work for a number of …
The kindercoffin instead of kindergarten. The kindercoffin I lived in throughout my childhood. A white coffin like the walls if my bedroom. A place to hide in as hiding was the utmost necessary thing to do. I hid under the bed, in the closet and the crawlspace in the cellar where I read, by flashlight, …
We all know of Plein Air and here in Kittery Point, ME, one sees painters at work in the summer with easels planted by the sea, Chauncy Creek, in the Rachel Carson Woods, in fields and by salt water marshes. Less visible are its poets of which I am one. Roughly translated, elle e`ecrit a …
I read the other day about the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the duel in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and Burr politically ruined. This tragedy is a bit of a mystery. No one can say why, at some point, they didn’t withdraw from the duel. But I have a good guess. …
Poets are the slaves of silence, a sluttish silence that wants it all—forfeit of heart, mind, body, soul—as barter for germinating words, words that come out of a long hibernation during which their roots roost, nest. Keep an ear pressed to ground, one poet taught me and hence I have learned to listen to earth—a …
If you feel you’re still “finding your voice,” consider what Seamus Heaney says about his discovery of his own when he wrote the poem “Digging.” In his essay “Feeling Into Words,” he writes of it, “I had done more than make an arrangement of words; I felt that I had let down a shaft into real …