What, Me Worry?
Today’s doom scrolling down an endless pit of Twitter takes included a heavy handful of optimistic women, sitting in their cars, positively exasperated by the joy they felt after early voting in their states.
Read MoreA 2013 Audio Experiment Turned Into a Poetry Project
As part of my creative thesis for my MFA, I made visual artworks out of several dozen poems (poems which lent themselves to visual display). Additionally, I set up an audio station (laptop plus headphones) for an experimental project in which I recorded my then fourteen-month-old daughter…
Read MoreDoctors on a Morning Zoom Call
The group had for a long time been all male. The head of the group, a doctor my wife knows pretty well, was persuaded to ask her to join the committee because of the gender disparities. Think: “we need one of you for the optics.”
Read MoreOn the Accuracy of a Meme
This meme (above) was immediately interesting to me, but not because it looked accurate or trustworthy. In fact, it looked interesting because it looked absurd. So I thought I'd pull a Ronald Reagan and "trust but verify." After an exhaustive Google search, I was finally able to figure out how to find "nyc crime rate by year" and I also found an official table of crime statistics through calendar year 2021 (the last complete year and last year for which information is fully available).
Read MoreA Pocketful of Rejections
I was never the guy at the bar who hit on every woman there. I had friends who were like that. Quantity over quality. Sorry, that’s an offensive and pretty disgusting way to look at the dating scene. But I couldn’t deny it “worked” for those guys, who, more often than not, would leave our group of guy friends at some point in the night to go home with a woman in order to chase the excitement of a new “conquest,” a woman interested in being—or a woman willing to be—partner to a brief physical engagement.
Read MoreOn Rejection as a Banal Part of Life
Writers know: rejection is not something we seek out, but it is a significant part of the game. A post today on Facebook reminded me that four years ago I wrote about a very short work being accepted, but that it was an exception to the general rule that submissions end in rejection.
Read MoreOn Rejection
Six and a half years ago, after completing writing a poem I really liked, I submitted it for the first time. 233 days later, I got the standard rejection letter. No problem. Even then I was used to opening rejection letters, updating my submissions spreadsheet, and moving on.
But I really felt like this poem was "good." I put that word in quotes, because
Read MoreEulogy for Joan D. Hill (October 15, 1951 - February 11, 2020)
I want to start with a number: Five thousand two hundred and twenty nine. It’s not a number you hear all the time. But it’s the number that Mom happened to use when referring to how many things she had to do:
Read MoreLacking Eunoia
My favorite work of all time is a book-length poem. It was published in 2001. That’s this century. Whenever anyone asks me my favorite work…
Read MoreStiatimcatis - a needlessly complicated form of constraint-based poetry
The word “stiatimcatis” (STY-uh-tim-KAH-tis) is an acronym that stands for “Seed Text Into Acrostic, Then Into Morse Code, And Then Into Syllables,” and that is the method of constraint that dictates the construction of the poem…
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