This article first appeared in the Press-Enterprize, August 11, 2024 A few weeks ago, during the peak of a heat wave, I took the kids to the San Diego Zoo’s Safari Park. Despite the weather, we had a great time, and I decided to capture one of the moments in a haibun. The haibun form …
Originally published in the Press-Enterprise, July 2014 If you ask a roomful of poets what poetry actually is, you’ll hear a lot of grandiloquent hemming and hawing. Poets talk about poetry like the old parable of the blind men describing an elephant: “It’s long and slender like a snake!” “No, it’s thick and sturdy like …
RochesterInk Poetry Festival, October 2007 This talk might be subtitled, “Where Poetry Comes From,” because that’s what I’m most interested in. The best poems, the poems we want to reread and memorize and carry with us forever, are those that offer some kind of insight. They connect. They resonate. They touch on a deeper truth—a …