Learning To Love The Questions: What Are The Pros and Cons of Being Well-Known?
When I think about what my reputation as a poet means to me now...I think about the audience(s) that matter most to me, and those are the people for whom my work has mattered in material ways.
Craft Talk: Don’t Ask A Poem To Do The Work Of An Essay
We do not, and we should not, assume that the speaker of a poem is autobiographically identical with the poet, even when the poem is written in the first person, even when we know that the speaker and the poet share some aspects of the experience the poem contains.
Rereading Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing The Language
I could not have articulated it this way back then, but I felt straitjacketed by much of the male poetic tradition in which I was being educated and in which I understood I would be expected to write
Learning To Love The Questions: What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?
[I]f I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing.
The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma
—Based on a talk I gave on a panel in 2017 at the Western Maryland Independent Literary Festival
Learning To Love The Questions: Poetry Versus Propaganda
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
—Audre Lorde, “Power”
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September 13, 2025 - How Writing Poetry Helped Me Come To Terms With What The Men Who Violated Me Did To Me When I Was A Boy
A Reading & Discussion at the Jackson Heights Public Library
Date: Saturday, September 13
Time: 2:30-3:30
Where:
Publication News and Some Thoughts on Patience and Process
Dear Friends,
I am very excited to share with you that an essay it took me nearly thirty years to
