-
Hyphae–and gifts
-
Curiosity kills the writer
-
Poetic circuitry
I just had tea with the lovely poet, person, and letterpress publisher Emily Hancock of St. Brigid Press. She’s planning an ecopoetry event at Stone Soup Books in Waynesboro, Virginia on September 13th, and I’ll be part of it, with Jeanne Larsen, Sarah Ann Winn, and, we hope, a relative of Karenne Wood to discuss…
-
Aiming vs. wandering
Oppressive weather, oppressive politics. Sometimes it’s hard to see a way forward, with billionaires controlling the show and the current government chipping away at the integrity of a voting system that was flawed to start with. My spouse remains an energetic activist anyway. In addition to writing for local and regional newspapers, he’s been making…
-
Sneak preview of Poetry from the Underworld
-
Getting dirty for poetry
Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments. I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this…
-
Spring ephemerals
March 23, 2026 This morning I took my first solitary ramble of the new season in the woods behind campus, a favorite walk, especially in spring. The ridges folding steeply down to the Maury River are full of spring wildflowers: this early I found lots of twinleaf and spring beauties (a.k.a. miner’s lettuce, good to…
-
Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah
Performances ahead: Now filing out of the auditorium for a while: AWP and Shenandoah. A friend of mine, describing a thorny family situation amid the hubbub of AWP’s Book Fair, tried to say, “I shouldn’t use scare quotes.” The phrase came out “square coats.” Square old me, standing there in my favorite velvet blazer–I hadn’t…
-
Winter bongos
Yesterday I drafted this blog from inside a very cold bongo drum. High winds rippled and banged our metal roof riotously: “Thumbing / the tin roof like a smoker who / cannot get the house to stay alight,” I wrote in Mycocosmic, in a poem about perimenopausal sleeplessness. Even though hot flashes are rare now,…