Poetry and About Poetry

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin My rating: 5 of 5 stars How much I already miss Ursula Le Guin. Her fantasy and sci-fi novels explore what it means to be a human, to be gendered, to live with a natural world instead of against it. This collection of essays from her blog are more personal–and leave me with the illusion that I knew her or at least the wish that she had been my neighbor. Here we watch the natural world together. Here I listen to her thoughts on politics and science vs belief and find myself nodding. Whether you are already an avid reader of Le Guin or if you are not a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, this collection is thought-provoking, full of heart and joy, and a joy to read. View all my reviews

“I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul.” – Jean Cocteau

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine will publish two of my poems in their upcoming issue available in March. This is the third time they have accepted my poetry. Thank you SBLAAM.

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end. Ursula K. Le Guin

Mourning Ursula K. Le Guin. Her Left Hand of Darkness blew me away. Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88 – The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Today%20in%20Books&utm_term=BookRiot_ThisWeekInBooks_DormantSuppress

My poem “ Unforgetting ” is live now Heron Tree.

Thank you Parentheses Journal @ParenthesesArt for accepting my poem "Shades of Difficulty" for future publication.

Thank you Parentheses Journal @ParenthesesArt for accepting my poem “Shades of Difficulty” for future publication,

The dream is still alive even if some choose to believe in a nightmare.

From A. R. Ammons “Garbage” the hackers, having none hack away at intensity: they want to move, disturb, shock: they show the idleness of pretended feeling: feeling moves by moving into considerations of moving away: real feeling assigns its weight gently to others, helps them meet, deal with the harsh, brutal, the ineluctable, eases the burdens of unclouded facts: the strident hackers miss no chance to dramatize, hurt, fairly or unfairly, for they fear their emptiness: the gentlest, the most refined language, so little engaged it is hardly engaging, deserves to tell the deepest wishes, roundabout fears: loud boys, the declaimers, the deaf listen to them: to the whisperers, even the silent, their moody abundance: the poem that goes dumb holds tears: the line, the fire line, where passion and control waver for the field, that is a line so diffcult to keep in the right degree, one side not raiding the other: (G, 120—121)

A great dramatic reading of The Waste Land by Fiona Shaw. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot My rating: 5 of 5 stars As is true for most readers, when I first encountered The Waste Land in the 1960s, I found myself in a very foreign poetic land. I read the annotations and explications. I listened to my professors. I reread and mad innumerable margin notes. I felt the poem’s power and despair. But its meaning seemed hard to parse. Now, decades later, rereading yet again, I know the poem and the poem knows me. We still live in The Waste Land. The loss of all mooring after WWI still remains a debris we drift with. But the poem itself seems very approachable now, its discordant ballet of voices powerful as ever, but its sense much more apparent to me. You must read and reread this poem. My critical opinion of it had moved over time to it being overrated—but now, no. It is a seminal poem of the last century. And its relevance today is profound. View all my reviews

Here is the HereABook site for my books.

Here is the HereABook site for my books.

Here is the HereABook site for my books.

The Muse with on of my poems can be downloaded for Kindle right now at no charge.

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block: you need only lower your standards.” William Stafford

http://theweek.com/articles/746503/james-lee-burkes-6-favorite-books-aspiring-novelists?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=afternoon&utm_medium=01_07_18-article_4-746503

GFT Presents: One in Four   Vol. 2, Issue 2 is now available, including 2 of my poems.

GFT Presents: One in Four   Vol. 2, Issue 2 is now available, including 2 of my poems.

GFT Presents: One in Four   Vol. 2, Issue 2 is now available, including 2 of my poems.

Rayfish by Mary Hickman My rating: 3 of 5 stars “There are no feelings in this piece–there is nothing but instinct.” So writes Mary Hickman in one of her prose poems in this collection. There seems a craftlessness that is perhaps intended. These seems more stream-of-consciousness essays than prose poems, but I must be wrong. The collection won the Laughlin award after all. “I generally know I am sick the moment I take the photo,” she writes, weaving medical procedures with art works, foreign stays with family matters. We wonder what is biographical and what is fantasy–but I do not wonder enough to reread. For me, something is missing. A phantom limb perhaps. A vacant mirror looking at itself? View all my reviews

The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry  (Vol. 5, Issue 2) contains one of my poems

The Muse - An International Journal of Poetry (Vol. 5, Issue 2) contains one of my poems

Former Germanna president ‘gratified and humbled’ by care nursing grads gave him .

In 2017 my poetry was accepted by these 32 journals and e-zines: 50 Haikus Aji Magazine Allegro Poetry Magazine Burningword Literary Journal Chantwood Magazine The Deadly Writers Patrol Dual Coast Magazine Foliate Oak Literary Magazine Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review GFT Press One in Four Glass: A Journal of Poetry Gravel: A Literary Journal Heron Tree The Hungry Chimera Into the Void Magazine Inwood Indiana Literature Today The Muse: An International Journal of Poetry The Mystic Blue Review Piedmont Virginian Magazine Poetry Quarterly The Ravens Perch Red Earth Review The Sea Letter Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine Summerset Review Temenos Journal Three Line Poetry Two Cities Review The Voices Project The Wayfarer The Write Place at the Write Time My thanks to all the editors.