I generally share my poems with a few friends before I mail them out. A sample audience, as it were. Because of this, I’ve been asked how I came to write the enclosed, as the voice and tone are different from poems I’ve written lately. Perhaps the following note, written to a friend and editor, …
It happens sometimes, quick as a wink and just in the nick of time—the mega-attack of pure joy. I never know when it’s coming, but when it does, as it did last night, I’m seized by joy, end up singing and dancing around the house just like a child, just like a very happy child, …
These words—fierce and lonesome—hold hands, become mates. A dynamic combo, explosive ammo for the writer. I can’t help but think my lonesomeness makes me fierce. Out of hours and hours of being just one in a universe of many, there comes not a torch song, but torched words, each with its own touché. It has …
My mother is slipping slowly now. She has no sense of the real world around her. Yesterday, she told my sister that she is flying. When sis asked her where she’s flying to, Mother answered, “To heaven.” I find myself in this strange world that my wife Phoebe calls, simply, a death watch. I’m …
Today a thought descended: language possesses a lost luminosity. It paired itself with a further one: language is the primitive refined by the writing that wrenches us into being. These two notions feel right to me, complete. Writing as quest, as a hunter going after the scent of music inside every word. Like wine tasters, …
I guess like most writers I’d like to defeat time. I’d like the dead to live on forever, along with some trees, flowers, birds and insects I’ve known. At some point a seed was planted, and it continues to sprout through my eyes, my ears, my mouth—even my nose (that bloodhound for the troubles of …
The coach has classes of sixty. That’s OK, though, because some of our language classes, say Advanced Chinese, have four kids, so our average high school class size is 32, the exact state maximum. The coach is holding down his end of the arithmetic average. Anyway, three weeks ago the school closed the gym for renovations, …
Poetry needs immediacy. Just about everyone agrees about this, hence so much writing in 1st person, present tense. What is less commonly considered in poetry’s demand for intimacy and just as real intimacy is difficult between real people, the intimacy between the poet and poem is equally challenging. This means honing in, bearing down upon …