My first read of this little book of poems left me haunted. The title poem, presented first, seems to encapsulate the whole experience for me: I felt as though I were plunged into someone else’s completely well-formed line of thought and therefore that if I could only stay with it long enough, I was bound …
Issue One of Inch is out. From the site: Inch is a quarterly magazine devoted to tiny poems and tiny fiction. We believe that good things come in small packages, so we focus our eight pages on poems of one to nine lines, or fiction of 750 words or less. I just ordered my copy. …
Thanks to dumbfoundry for pointing out this excellent article on the sad state of elitism into which poetry has sunk today. It’s a pithy little piece that plays fast and loose with history, but it is the closest hammer I’ve yet seen to hitting the nail on the head. My wife Valerie dedicated her life …
Read The Poem What is so great about this poem is the beautiful thought rendered through indelible imagery. The owl descends, “like an angel, or a Buddha with wings” then alights “like a little lighthouse.” But it is this thought of light, consuming light–“scalding, aortal light”–that, paired with the fierceness of the predator, the white-on-white …
Mary Oliver: “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” Read More »
The very existence of a new sincerity movement has sparked some interesting reflection in my mind. First, I think of poets whose sincerity and focus on beauty predate this moniker: Mary Oliver, Denise Levertov, B.H. Fairchild. Clearly, there has been no lack of sincerity in poetry even during the darkest hours of the postmodern period. …
Michael from Cruelest Month wrote back to me this morning to say I won their contest for giveaways of The Anatomy Theater. Given the corporal nature of this body of work, I probably won’t read it while tucking in to a big meal. (I suppose this poet knows all too well that, “we murder to …
