Author’s Note: “ ‘Stone Sijo’ is my attempt to highlight the materiality of language by using only monosyllabic words. I think of each word as a stone, and the poem itself as an edifice constructed of carefully-placed stones. Sound is foregrounded. The stanza form is that of a sijo, but I linked five of them... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem suggests that though beauty has its own power and is flush with pleasure, it is held in check and made to suffer by the superseding strength of a brutal and jealous god. ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem—a pantoum—has two sources: my first experience of love and marriage, and the remarkable Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, which gave me courage and language to speak ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem grows out of my fascination with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a couple of unparalleled greatness. Franklin, a paraplegic ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “We live in a migratory center for several of nature’s long-distance flyers, most famously the monarch butterfly, the subject of an earlier poem of mine. In 2016, I read a newspaper article about the Godwit, a bird that travels almost non-stop to South America after hatching in Canada’s Hudson Bay and visiting our shores for food and rest. No one knows how it does this. As a retired brain surgeon, poet and forty-year Chesapeake sailor, I was naturally drawn to the Godwit as a poetic subject.”... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “The occasion for this poem was attending a friend’s 50th birthday party and seeing his younger brother for the first time in 30-plus years. That small shockwave of recognition and surprise at his aging sent me heading down this poetic rabbit hole, where I found myself wanting to hold the moment briefly, then accelerate time at warp speed — as a reminder (mostly to myself) of this precious continuum that links us all.” ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “The Beautiful Impossible”—speculative and oddly detailed—imagines the speaker before he was born, a figure who inhabits Nebraska and falls in love with a woman who ultimately turns away from him. At its core, the poem plays with questions we all ask at times: What would’ve happened had I done this instead of that? Would I be happier were I another? [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “When a significant relationship ends painfully, we often find ourselves rehashing the turning points, the decisions, the regrets. With the repetition of “when, then, that,” I hope to ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem came to me when I was traveled to a conference in Asheville, North Carolina. I grew up in Tennessee, and when I took a walk in those southeastern woods, I was flooded with ... [Continue Story]
Author’s note: Let’s not pretend all long-term relationships are a place lust dies, where neither party finds another person attractive ever again. Fantasy allows for a moment of escape in what is otherwise a committed coupling, and this poem explores how romantic fantasies are born and the ways in which they exert influence in real life... [Continue Story]
