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 …
First, remember it’s not my funeral. It’s yours. I won’t hear the music. I won’t hear the prayers. I won’t hear the cries or the laughs. I won’t be of much use. So indulge yourself. I only have a few requests. Do my funeral like I did my life: don’t be cheap but don’t be …
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 …
1) Be afraid if many reports, which sound important, are read by few and taken seriously by fewer. 2) Be afraid if a critique is thought to substantiate the inadequacy of the person voicing the observation. 3) When fundamental problems are reported, be afraid if the usual solution is to humiliate the person making the assessment. …
In Imago, a finely-realized first collection of poems, Manhattan-based Joseph Legaspi looks back through the gates of adulthood at an Eden-like childhood in the Philippines. But these free-verse narratives are not simple, sugar-coated, or — for all their use of the word “I” — self-centered; their delicate surfaces give way to reveal a world that …
So the army lets me out a few days early to register for college. I should have been in till February, but they send me home from Vietnam on 7 December 1970. I have to enroll right away. Until then, I’m still on active duty, a member of the 4th Infantry Division. But from the …
It occurs to me that, thirty-nine years ago, at about this very hour, I returned home to St. Louis from Vietnam. I always remember it because it’s Pearl Harbor Day. One day a rocket flew right over our hooch. The next day we were down on the coast, checking out of the Nam. The day …