June 20th marked the official launch of my new book, The Boxer of Quirinal. The poems, written over ten years, explore challenges that all animals – from majestic herons to humble inchworms – face in their struggle to survive. But humanity must confront an additional obstacle: the eternal presence of war. So how do we live with that?

To be a poet is to be attached to life by a different set of hooks.

Emily Dickinson’s example permits all “Nobodies” to believe in their own work in spite of the world’s neglect. And I say, bless her for that.

Poetry is a manifestation of the human urge to make sense of chaos, to find unity and symmetry in external reality.

Thoughts about poetic form.

Can you recall ever giving a poetry reading that might have gone better, or might better not have happened at all? It happens to all of us. Even marquee poets can remember the reading where no one came.

If poetry is a matter of sounds, then sound must be the basic unit of form. Putting it another way, what do assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, rhythm – all of the tools in the toolbox used for constructing form in poetry – have in common? All of them, in their different ways, create recognizable patterns […]

If the history of Western literature were compressed into a single day, Homer would declaim the opening lines of The Iliad on the stroke of midnight; Dante would climb out of Hell at 6 pm; Chaucer would ride for Canterbury at 7; Shakespeare and Milton would follow them across life’s stage two hours after that. These and […]

On a snowy January day, years ago, I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange a Christmas gift. As I sorted through the mess on my desk (the clutter in my study having reached Mephistophelian proportions), there was a thought in the front of my mind, that I had seen the slip […]