I have just returned from the 2015 AWP Conference, along with the other 12,999 writers, publishers and editors who likewise attended the 3-day event in Minneapolis. In my shady past, I have visited neuroscience conventions that had maybe twice that number of attendees, drawing as they did on a world-wide community of neuroscientists. But 13,000 people from the continental US conjoined around one loosely defined discipline was impressive. Hotels city-wide were totally booked. Restaurants everywhere were packed. And given the bacchanal nature of writers, the pubs were over-flowing. Continue reading “The Persistence of Poetry”
Month: April 2015
Easter at the Willow Brook Dairy
Please descend with me, you sentimentalists
and pilgrims, through our temperate grange smelling
of the vegetation, with the gravid
mare turned out among the strewing herbs,
which have their own names in French, and with our wedge
of day before us. There are so very many
different graduations of vitality
in life that logically it’s hard to say
where death exists. The risen Christ, we’re told,
appeared unto the Magdalene while looking
like a gardener. That’s hard to credit, but
I’m pleased to be here, hat in hand, among
the opiate philosophies, and seeing
how the windmill spins, the lister rusts
in Elam’s primeval barn. Continue reading “Easter at the Willow Brook Dairy”
It Occurs To Me That
in this season of unlikely miracles, we might enjoy the occasion to add to our concepts of spirituality:
FAT SPEAKS
Unlike the mirroring eyes, the pom pom heart,
I’m opaque, an oaf with no taste for driven individuation.
I’m blamed a lot these days,
I dumb down your cheekbones,
I assuage your nerves, calmed with my myelin sheathes,
your cells are founded upon my lipids. Continue reading “It Occurs To Me That”
Blue Islands, Blue as Ink 