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Marked Men at Open Letters Monthly
Thanks to Teow Lim Goh for including Marked Men in an Open Letters Monthly article, “6 Lyric Voices of Witness.” It’s a privilege to find my book cheek by jowl with David Mason’s Ludlow, not to mention books by Martha Collins, Tess Taylor, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Brian Komei Dempster.Read More
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Pushcart Nomination
I just discovered that a series of three wee poems of mine, published in the Twitter magazine unFold, have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It would tickle me to win on the basis of 140 characters each (actually, mine are mostly less than half that long), especially since my most “famous” poem is the one-line poem entitled “Artichoke“.Read More
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Announcing “The Conundrum”
Conundrum Press, which published my collection Thread of the Real, has announced the first issue of The Conundrum—a free, triannual sampler of the phenomenal literature this Colorado-based press publishes.Read More
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Bed of Coals Reviewed In-Depth by Jim Murdoch
Jim Murdoch I’m excited to report that Scottish poet and fiction writer Jim Murdoch, whose incisive essays appear regularly on his piquantly titled blog The Truth About Lies, has written an extensive essay on my own Bed of Coals. It is the most in-depth writing that anyone has done on any of my work, and I appreciate it especially because the structure of Coals admittedly makes it a challenge for readers, and Mr. Murdoch tackles that challenge with lots of close, insightful reading.Read More
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Boosting America’s IQ
A couple of days ago, heading out on the 400-mile trip from Indian Hills to Durango to meet our 4-week-old grandson for the first time, we stopped on our way out of town at the post office. Amid a stack of junk mail and bills was a padded envelope with a copy of the recently released anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. The editor, Becca J. R.Read More
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Bed of Coals—Signed Copies Available Now…
Note too that I’ve set aside 10 copies for any Perpetual Birder or friend of same who would like to review Bed of Coals in print or in pixels. Just email me at joe[at]jhwriter.com and let me know.Read More
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TwitPo?
For the first of three Twitter poems by moi, check out the Twitter-zine unFold on Twitter or at the magazine’s Web site. This first poem, like the others that follow, started out as bad haiku, but the requirement of Twitter that poems be one line forced me to [a] improve the poems (with editor Rose Auslander’s excellent advice)and [b] explore uses of punctuation as something akin to musical notation.Read More
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An Old Friend is Back in Town…
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Wassailing with Walt
ORDER SIGNED COPIES BY DECEMBER 15and receive free U.S.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 17
Uncles Uncle Walt drank German beer, Uncle Wystan whiskey.Uncle Dylan drank whatever made his tongue feel frisky. Uncle Pablo savored eels; Uncle Osip, stones.Uncle Seamus—cabbage and sloes boiled with marrow bones. Uncle Willie dreamed in a tower, Uncle Rob in a shack.Uncle Wally dreamed at the office of peignoirs and birds that were black. Uncle Bill loved many women, Uncle Frank loved men.Uncle Jack loved anyone who’d stimulate his pen. These and other uncles come to visit once a year.We munch a roasted bird with them; they toast themselves and cheer.Read More