I, too, went to bed amidst the howling of the autumn wind and awoke early the next morning amid the chanting of the priests Matsuo Basho My Young Friend, After almost sixty years, I have learned so little in life that I’m not sure if I can impart anything except sure methods for garnering …
Literature teachers are often want to say that anything can be made the subject of poetry. And this is the collection that proves that point. From diets to seafood to the treadmill, Nancy Pagh’s No Sweeter Fat makes the reader laugh, cry and reflect, often in the same poem. Concerning style, Pagh often evokes Walt …
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 …
Like any poet, I think a lot about language. It’s a way to connect with the physical world, but also to lift out of it. It’s abstract, but its source is concrete — the letters of our alphabet are based on a set of pictograms, stylized pictures used for words. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan glyphs, and cuneiform …
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 …
Knee-deep in football season and cool weather, and I’m ready to tackle cooking some hearty and homemade junk food. But with so many options, where’s a girl start? Chili? Nachos? Chips and dip? Potato skins? Quesadillas? And that doesn’t even begin to touch on tailgate-food like ribs and burgers and sausages and… All right. This …
I am the bee who clings with dew- tipped legs to the soft crowns of purple clover, the stupid happiness inside the blasted bud, an entanglement of clouds smitten with love-stricken light that is here, there, everywhere. Sun’s gold load, the dance inside the perfectly still great blue heron and the prostration of rain- battered …