A day of mourning for George HW Bush
It’s a new world order. Read more
Tag Archives: Poetry
In defense of Coyote
Perhaps the iconic trickster Coyote is a symbol for the frustrations of the smart person in a stupid world. Read more
The sacred rose and the guns of love
A rose for Maud…
View larger image at 5280 Lens Mafia…
William and Maud
I am haunted by numberless islands… – WB Yeats
Walking by the shore at dusk,
air leaden with a faith in words. Read more
Icarus (a small self-portrait)
Icarus (a small self-portrait)
Dandelions think they're bluebells.
Moths believe they're butterflies.
No one told them, or
they wouldn't listen.
What if I'm mistaken,
begoggled,
peddling DaVinci's madman
machine toward high noon?
Poem for the Trump Inaugural: "The Turning"
These truths we hold to be self-evident…
The Turning
– Samhain 1991
1.
In this dry land
crickets fear to chirp
for waste of moisture.
Rattlers bleach their bones,
listless in the summer scald.
2.
I don't want to say too much
for fear of being misconstrued
or maybe
for fear of being understood all too clearly
so here's your warning – Read more
The Butterfly Effect: revisiting an old poem
Old men are signal. Young men are noise.
Fractal Butterfly 004, by agsandrew at DeviantArt
When I was a young writer I swung for the fence with every syllable. I felt like any word that didn’t crush you with profound implications for eternity was a wasted opportunity. I resented articles. I didn’t understand white space, breathing room, the need for silence between beats, and I had little time for the banal, pedestrian-mongering wanks who did.
I learned more about these things as I grew, and I think becoming a photographer has honed those lessons even more. Noise drowns signal.
Even though I’m no longer a poet, I sometimes read things I wrote in that past life. Read more
Audre Lorde: S&R Honors an icon of artistic vision, diversity and self-awareness
Audre Lorde taught us that power begins with knowing and accepting ourselves.
In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde
The reading list for the contemporary poetry seminar during my first semester in the MA program at Iowa State was an interesting one. Elizabeth Bird, Louise Erdrich, Richard Wright, Charles Wright, Gary Snider, Carolyn Forché, plus a couple others I can’t recall right now. Also, the point of today’s story, Audre Lorde, a writer I had never heard of.
It was Fall of 1987 and it was a fascinating, albeit frustrating class. Read more
Photography may have saved my life
One of the symptoms of depression is an addiction to rumination. The vicious cycle of negative thinking that strips us of energy and desire. It is precisely our obsession with working out what makes us unhappy that makes us unhappy. – Chris Corner
You don’t walk away from something that was central to your very being for 35 years without … thinking about it.
Three or four years ago I wrapped my fourth book of poetry and hung up my quill, as it were. Read more
Poet Laureate Mark Strand dead: reflecting on something he said
Former US Poet Laureate Mark Strand is dead at 80.
In a 1998 interview with the Paris Review, poet Strand said something I find fascinating:
Well, I think what happens at certain points in my poems is that language takes over, and I follow it. It just sounds right. And I trust the implication of what I’m saying, even though I’m not absolutely sure what it is that I’m saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were absolutely sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and could verify it and check it out and feel, yes, I’ve said what I intended, I don’t think the poem would be smarter than I am. I think the poem would be, finally, a reducible item. It’s this “beyondness,” that depth that you reach in a poem, that keeps you returning to it. And you wonder, The poem seemed so natural at the beginning, how did you get where you ended up? What happened? I mean, I like that, I like it in other people’s poems when it happens. I like to be mystified. Because it’s really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours, finally, becomes the possession of the reader. I mean, in the act of figuring it out, of pursuing meaning, the reader is absorbing the poem, even though there’s an absence in the poem. But he just has to live with that. And eventually, it becomes essential that it exists in the poem, so that something beyond his understanding, or beyond his experience, or something that doesn’t quite match up with his experience, becomes more and more his. He comes into possession of a mystery, you know—which is something that we don’t allow ourselves in our lives.
RIP Galway Kinnell
One of our greatest poets has died at 87.
I had the privilege of seeing Kinnell read while I was at Iowa State in the late ’80s. He did some new things – things he’d been working on during the flight out, in fact – but this was the high point of the evening.
Thank you, Galway. Sleep well.
Summer Solstice 2014
22 is my lucky number. 22 years ago I wrote this poem, one of my best ever (or at least the one that a lot of people seemed to like). It’s a Solstice poem, and today is Solstice.
So here you go. Happy Solstice.
Wedding Song – a poetry reading (ArtSunday)
Apocalyptic neo-Symbolism. With some tangential comment on the pedestrian state of contemporary poetry.
Old Ethan’s quantum diary: a reading
I do not want to die.
Art is like life: you never know which direction it will hit you from next
You have to have a plan, but happiness depends on how well you roll with the punches.
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley – Robert Burns
No plan, however well conceived, survives contact with the enemy. – Military Adage
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. – Mike Tyson
NaPoWriMo 2014: the importance of influence
Our own poetic voices are the product of the voices of our heroes. Guess who mine are.
lullaby pit 