Mercury retrograde’s got me itching to get rid of all these papers everywhere. A woman’s work is never done. I’ve been writing for a long time with drafts piling up over more than 30 years now. It’s too much. I mostly write by hand. By that I mean that I Read more…
Back in 2018, THERETHEN published a limited edition chapbook of mine called resistance is beautiful. Over the years, the poems have morphed and the chapbook became a full-length manuscript. (It’s sitting in a binder over there waiting for someone to decide to publish it.) Eventhough some of these poems were Read more…
It was T.S. Eliot who noticed it first, that “April is the cruellest month” or at least he was the first one to bother writing it down. From “The Waste Land“: “April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain…” Read more…
Just the other day I was turned on to this Lucille Clifton poem, “Won’t you celebrate with me” by a colleague at work and now I’m grateful to be seeing, hearing and feeling it everywhere: Inspired By “What Is Left” 2020 @brooklynhiartmachine (artists Mildred Beltre and Oasa DuVerney) in collaboration with @bricbrooklyn the installation Read more…
I’m looking forward to my first virtual poetry reading. A week from Saturday it’s happening– on May 23rd at 5pm I’ll be reading with Alan Felsenthal as part of the Segue Reading Series‘ collaboration with Artists Space. More info and link available here.
I’m thinking about embodiment. I don’t often go into astrology here because it’s not everybody’s thing, but today’s Taurus new moon is joining up with Uranus as it’s squaring Saturn. That’s talking about a profoundly deep movement toward liberation & previously unimagined possibilities while confronting restriction, rules, limits, pressure, with Read more…
The fact that it’s poetry month again didn’t really register with me immediately, what with everything else going on. It’s not a luxury though and I’ve often insisted on the importance of a world where poetry, art, music, dance, JOY not only exist but flourish whatever else is going on. Read more…
Mary Oliver is quoted regularly in mindfulness and yoga circles. Probably because her lines are so beautiful and they’re also very true. One of them is “attention is the beginning of devotion” from her essay “Upstream.” (An article in the Atlantic, reflecting on that essay is here.) I could spend Read more…
Thrilled to get my hands on the latest copy of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. There are five of my recent poems in issue 45.1 along with fantastic work by some of my favorites, Cynthia Manick and Douglas Kearney as well as voices that are new to me. Thank you Read more…
While I was off meditating in the California hills, the good folks at The Poetry Project put together a feature of some of the writing that was produced in our Meditation in an emergency workshop this Fall. New work from Janae Brux, Anna Gurton-Wachter, E.C. Kane, Peter Bogart Johnson, Susana Read more…