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From My New Book
My poem ” Black Willow” appears in the December 2020 issue of O:JA&L (Open: Journal of Arts & Letters). You can also find it in my new book, Under Sleep’s New Moon, forthcoming July 1 from NYQ Books. NYQ published The World As Is: New & Selected Poems in 2016. O:JA&L is one of those gorgeous journals that would be impossible to produce in print unless you were a billionaire.Read More
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Chinese Fire
My good friend Joe Nigg, wrote an extraordinary 2016 book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. It includes a chapter on “Poetic Fire,” which itself includes a poem of mine—rooted in the phoenix image—called “Revenant.” Now, between Joe’s inclusion of “Revenant” and the book’s appearance in print, I revised the poem, making several minor and a few substantial changes. In particular, the arc of the second version became … well, darker … and it was that second, darker version that subsequently appeared in my collection The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.Read More
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A Landscape Picture in Aesthetica
The Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2018 just arrived in my mailbox, with a poem of mine among the 40 gathered into next year’s issue, mainly from the Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, with a few of us Yanks sprinkled in, along with some gorgeous work from Greece and Jamaica. The issue includes short fiction by 20 similarly diverse writers, hailing from England, Ireland, Belgium, Brazil, and various other elsewheres.Read More
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Why Does This Feel So Heartening?
Because it’s like the Good Versekeeping Seal, I guess. Click here for the actual virtual page.Read More
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The Worldwide Launch of The World As Is
Over to the right you’ll see a photo of my new, big fat collection of poems, The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015. My author’s copies arrived today from the publisher, NYQ Books, and oh my, NYQ did a beautiful job of production. Many thanks to Raymond Hammond, my editor at NYQ, a gentleman, fellow poet, critic, layout artist, and committed poetry lover who lavished a great deal of time on this project. His good taste and good sense have made the book better from punctuation to page and cover design.Read More
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Belife
One of my favorite online subscriptions is to the Clippings newsletter from Katexic. (Click here for a free subscription.) Clippings offers up a potpourri of quotations, intriguing links, and commentary notable for its brevity and wit. So I was thrilled to see, earlier this week, that editor Chris Lott had snagged and reproduced my early poem “Belief,” from my first full-length collection, The Undersides of Leaves. Only problem … the title was mangled: “Belife” instead of “Belief.” Naturally, I emailed Chris to thank him for the ink (er … pixels) and to point out the error.Read More
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The Satire Lounge
The Satire Lounge is Joe’s 16th collection of poems. Title: The Satire Lounge Publisher: Folded Word ISBN: 978-1-61019-227-9 Publication Date: August 21, 2015 Length: 42 pages Binding: Trade paper From the back cover: “The Satire Lounge is a guide to the underbelly of the writing world, lit by a lone ‘laptop’s screenlight glint’ and fed by ‘Mike’s Fine Sardines.’ Here, ‘Thought Police’ patrol ‘high-speed poetry,’ while cowpies take over haiku.Read More
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A New Edition of The Earth-Boat Sails into View
Some time back Folded Word’s editor asked if the press could issue a second edition of my 2012 chapbook The Earth-Boat, and of course I said yes. Folded Word quite simply does beautiful work, and besides, the reissue gave me the opportunity to make a few revisions that would ordinarily have had to wait for a new full-length collection. The new volume has a new version of the cover art created by my good friend John Ransom, an extraordinary surrealist/abstract painter based in Venice, California.Read More
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A Foe Pah re: Marked Men
When my wonderful friend and Web artist Sabina Espinet imported The Perpetual Bird from its original home on Blogger, certain draft posts showed up in my Wordpress back office. (On Blogger, drafts are left in order by the creation date, so if you create a draft and don’t finish it, and two weeks go by, it’s easy to forget that you’d begun it, or—if you’re me—to somehow believe that you’ve already finished and posted it.) Among these drafts was a fragment containing a link to an interview done with me by Robert King, founder and proprietor of the Colorado Poets Center.Read More