We’ve all been riveted by survival stories—those who survive shipwrecks, live on berries in the woods, withstand Artic cold for days on end. In this way we learn that the human capacity to survive extreme circumstances is quite large. Some, perhaps many, have gone on Outward Bound journeys, been solo, recorded the rigors in journals …
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 …
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 …
I stole the title for this piece from Ira Sadoff, a title I came across long ago and faithfully recorded in what I call my Nickel Notebooks. These are old composition books in which I record poems by other poets, their musings and reflections and thereby remain in training as the apprenticeship for the poet …
At first I wrote: the art of loneliness is the art of poetry. Then art became heart. I am a solo singer hoping to be a singular singer in a silent choir. Rilke once wrote that a marriage was about two solitudes bordering each other. I once thought that of my own marriage until I …
Someone once said that writing a poem meant riding upon the pulse. It is a cataclysmic happening with all the synapses firing at once. In order to achieve the lyric poem, one must build a sky bridge, be connected to deep red earth and moody, bluesy stars. Create a cosmos and step into it. Get …