I’m not quite sure what got me thinking about Irina Ratushinskaya recently but something did, and brought back how closely I followed her work during the eighties; Poets all over the world took her case very personally. Many of us wrote letters protesting her imprisonment and asking for her release. (Here is a link to …
My father was a farmer turned politician. It was from him that I learned about honoring the land coupled with a concomitant social conscience. My mother was both a painter and a sculptor and through her influence, I was drawn to the arts at an early age. She believed that all artistic pursuits were a …
Today during the men’s class, the teacher asked one of the inmates how his novel was going. He had been having writer’s block for a while, as he didn’t know what to do with the hero’s lady character. “So, how did you get over that writer’s block, Marcus?” “I killed her,” he said. Everyone laughed. …
Tradition tells us that muses are angelic creatures who descend from clouds, or drift like smoke through an open window — while my muse is a guy who walks into a bar. But we take what we can get, right? The sources of poetry are too uncertain for me to refuse any gift, no matter how unlikely …
I just came in from my evening seaside walk. Exotic black sand harvested by winter storms, heaps of seaweed with chartreuse and fuchsia tints, low, low tide, sun dousing itself in the marsh among cattails and red-winged blackbirds, moon rising on a quicksilver horizon. Such beauty, at its heart-wrenching heights, can be disarming, even alarming …
They call it toilet talk. She kneels in front of the porcelain bowl, hands cupping the base like a man grabbing his lover’s hips on a dance floor. Her face dips down into the oval hole, calling his name, Marco. His name travels through pipe past grit and grime, coiling through the loops and turns …
Notes toward an understanding of poetic imagination When I was a student in Iowa City, Stanley Bomgarten and I used to drink at a place called George’s a few blocks from campus. One morning we were celebrating Stanley getting fired from his job as assistant pastor at the local Baptist Church when a young man …
“How was your writing week?” the teacher asks from the front of the classroom. We’re in a small circle, a ring of warm bodies surrounded by cold concrete walls. All women, all eager to share what’s resting inside. They do this at the beginning of every class. Talk about their writing weeks. The good. The …