When winter grows in me and I stir in the morning at the least word in anger at what I have done and what my children do I search and hope for longer days where the light rings with new life I yearn for the yellow of forsythia that blooms beside our house in the …
Here's a poem from long before I started The White Whale. The imagery came to me in a dream, and I woke up the next day and wrote the poem.
Sugar Maple, October 2020 I come outside to berate the men, pulled up on my sidewalk in their truck, not realizing it's really a hearse, these the pall bearers They mean no harm; they have a job to do and they apologize, but then the lift and chipper arrive, and I know what death lies …
I recently came across an online interview with the poet Ted Kooser from World Literature Today that shared his thoughts on the power of metaphor. In the past few months, I’ve been rereading one of his books, Splitting an Order, and sometimes I’ll select one of his poems to imitate in my own writing. So …
It’s about this time that I’m usually wrapping up my teaching of American Romanticism. We’ve made it through Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and we’re just about done with my favorite, Henry David Thoreau. Over the years, I’ve made deletions and additions to the scope and sequence, hoping …
The White Whale 