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poetry, publishing, and mentoring
Devotions of the Ear
This is the first installment of a three-part exploration that privileges the role that sound and silence play in making the poem. I mean most particularly to explore the sounds that sound longs for inside the poem – sounds of the outer world and, as well, those felt whirrings inside the body. This is all […]
Posted in: Poetry
The Singing of Birds
July 16, 2012
Last night I stood outside in the dark, the garden still hot from another day of drought, softly steaming with the good watering I had given it. It was quiet. Too quiet. Where were the birds? Where was the birdsong? Were they all bedded down for the night in the heavy branches of the lindens, […]
Posted in: Poetry
Put the Phone Down: On Lists and the Insolence of Loss
June 14, 2012
The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack Antony & Cleopatra (V.i. 14-15) [Many of the premises you find here will comprise the heart and soul of my Mentoring services. They will also be further developed in The Perfect Ten Seminar this coming October (26-29) in Truchas, New Mexico, where a […]
Posted in: Poetry
A Shadow’s Shadow: The Writer and the Writer’s Ambition
March 19, 2012
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) Commenting on Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa,” a work for two violins, prepared piano and chamber orchestra Wolfgang Sandner says in the liner notes: “What kind of music is this? Whoever wrote it must have left himself behind at one point […]
Posted in: Poetry
On Downton Abbey, House Parties, and Surviving AWP
February 28, 2012
A few days ago I went to a house party with poetry. The occasion was an incantatory reading by poet Karen Chase, start-to-finish, of her book-length poem, “Jamali-Kamali: A Tale of Passion in Mughal India” (Mapin Publishing, India 2011). As a starting point, Karen Chase knew only this: just off Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road in Delhi, India, […]
Posted in: Poetry
Grace Notes — Singing the Poetic Line
February 15, 2012
Each line a poem, each line reaching out beyond its line break into an uncertain endlessness – and so each line earning that sort of honor. Or not. In a sense, this installment is more impressionistic than specific. But its intentions nevertheless have to do with very specific qualities of attention and regard, somehow achieved […]
Posted in: Poetry
In a Single Breath
January 12, 2012
Enough of cake and cookies, out with the stale macaroons, the spent candles, the oddments of wrapping paper and ribbon behind the couch, under the couch, between the sofa cushions. Days lengthen, at first almost imperceptibly, and although there is so much winter yet to come, the soul begins its slow thaw, urging us in […]
Posted in: Poetry
January 9, 2013
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