Monday, September 26, 2011
Strange Horizons is having a funding drive. I first ran across Strange Horizons in July 2002, sitting in my brother-in-law’s office in Edmonton, Alberta while he and my sister were at work, during one of my long visits to stay with them and write. I was working on one of the poems from The Glaze [...]
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Today was the second half of Vanderbilt’s Saturday University class with Billy Collins, “Under the Hood: The Mechanics of Poetry.” (I wrote about the first half here.) The bulk of the session was devoted to the kinds of “turns” a poem can take—that is, the developmental moments in a poem which turn our attention. In [...]
Sunday, September 11, 2011
I attended the first half of Vanderbilt’s Saturday University class with Billy Collins, “Under the Hood: The Mechanics of Poetry,” yesterday. He started with the premise that the process of writing is a series of negotiations between the will of the poet and the waywardness of the poem, and that poets are the kind of [...]
Four and Twenty just posted their March 2011 issue (that links to their link to it, but here’s a direct link to the pdf). My poem “Summer in Tennessee” is on the penultimate page before the bios. For those of you interested in genesis, it’s a failed haiku. I couldn’t compress it enough to make [...]
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Last night I went to see Kate Daniels at the Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series. So many people showed up that we had to trade rooms with a class in session to fit everybody in. I went with my new poetry friend Declan, who runs the monthly critique group I go to at the Nashville Public [...]
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I saw Billy Collins reading this morning at Hume-Fogg High School here in Nashville. He read a lot of my favourites (but not “Weighing the Dog” or “Hangover“): “Ballistics,” “A Dog on his Master,” “The Death of the Hat,” “Feedback,” “Forgetfulness,” “The Golden Years,” “The Lanyard,” “Oh My God” (“The past tense of ‘Oh my [...]
Saturday, November 6, 2010
My folks went home Wednesday after an almost two-week long visit. I took both Fridays off work so we could have some extra time together, and we went to Cheekwood (as you know), the Nashville Zoo (which has a new baby giraffe, but we missed it – it was born the day Mom and Dad [...]
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The Southern Festival of Books is this weekend, and I went today to see Paolo Bacigalupi, Brian Yansky, Sara Lewis Holmes, Dana Reinhardt and a bunch of people from the writing group, the Nashville Writers’ Alliance. I really enjoyed it–made me a bit homesick for The Word on the Street though, not that I’m not [...]
