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Manuscript

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reworking my manuscript, ordering and reordering, adding and removing poems, trying to shape it into something that’s more than just a coherent collection.  I want my book to feel like a particular kind of experience, one that develops unexpectedly as it unfolds in time, like a provocative…

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Compost Season

It’s that time again.  My university’s semester has ended, and while this does not, alas, mean that I’ve logged any hammock time, nor that all my interns for August are placed, nor yet that a certain grisly assessment report is approved by all relevant parties…it does mean opening the composter. In our semi-rural one-acre lair,…

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Culinary Art

The shapely tesserae of a well-chopped onion.  Butter and flour foaming into roux.  The beauty of texture, the formal grace: the rough seed husk and the slippery seed.  Precision in small things.  The hours spent simmering and adjusting, simmering and stirring till the earth is in it.  Knifecraft; the importance of technique.  The colorful raw…

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Good Poets You’ve (Probably) Never Read, Part I: Buckram and Burning Birds

Everyone has them—the books that we loved that got only cursory critical attention, if any.  The friends who managed to get the books finally, finally into print, only to hear a few grains of sand shifting in the long silence as they drive to the liquor store to buy themselves the only champagne that will…