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Best American, lit mags, and the merry-go-round
I’m now allowed to announce that my poem “Sex Talk” will appear in Best American Poetry 2025, chosen by Terence Winch. I had absolutely no idea it was under consideration and have never been in one of these anthologies before–didn’t think I ever would be. The December email from Mark Bibbins was a bolt out…
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Fruiting the substrate
Publishing a poetry book involves nourishing your work in what may feel like darkness, growing networks. It can take a long time until the mushroom-poems themselves burst into the light. And who knows if people will find them, devour them, and find them tasty. Am I taking this metaphor a little far for you? Too…
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2024 in reading
Pictured above are four strong new poetry books I read during the time-out-of-time between Christmas and New Year’s. Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones, a former Shenandoah Editorial Fellow, stretches the boundaries of the poetic in surreal and striking ways, often by deploying ekphrasis. In Rough, there’s lots of powerful ekphrasis too, but what stays with…
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Myco-comic for Mycocosmic
My spouse Chris Gavaler is a comics scholar and creative writer who does crazy things with Microsoft Paint, an old graphics editor that’s supposed to be very limited but which he keeps inventive finding ways to redeploy. He’s also on sabbatical and just finished taking a drawing class that developed his visual arts skills. One…
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Harvest (while still sowing)
I’ve always loved the idea of a harvest dinner with loved ones as the days get short–celebrating squash, apples, mushrooms, and whatever fall in the region dishes up–but the actuality can be difficult. When I was young, Thanksgivings leaned toward the terrible. My siblings and mother and I felt giddy in 2012 when my right-wing…
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Shaky & a still life
On election day, I taught a Zoom workshop to a small creative writing workshop at Western Washington State, with a focus on spell- and prayer-poems. The teacher and I thought hard about the timing and decided it would be a good distraction for us and them–and it sure was. I read some poems and answered…
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Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)
My last poetry book, The State She’s In, launched on March 17th, 2020. I’m far from the only author whose disappointed feeling was swamped by the dimensions of pandemic disaster. Millions died; literary cancelations were vanishingly small potatoes by comparison. Other authors shared stories of their 9/11/21 launch dates or the collapse of the book-buying…
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Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full
It’ll be Shenandoah‘s 75th anniversary in 2025 and celebrations are beginning. First up, an exhibition at W&L’s Leyburn Library curated by Editor in Chief Beth Staples and students. It features precious and startling items from the archive. For example, poems and letters from Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings are on display, and, more unusually,…
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Magic reciprocity
My two fall classes are a first-year writing seminar called “Other Worlds” and an advanced poetry class called “Haunted & Strange,” so as autumn starts, I’m feeling weird in a good way. I’m also reading Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, full of meditations on poetry’s magic and modernism’s intersections with the occult, and wow, I…
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Small college English, ’90s style
I just began a new term with thirty years at W&L in the rearview mirror. I looked up 1994: aside from the leaders and wars I remembered, Wikipedia reminded me that was the year Munch’s The Scream was stolen, Kurt Cobain died, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president, the Chunnel opened, and Pulp Fiction…