This is the fourth installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright." Here's a link to parts 1, 2 and 3. When I was young, the world felt impossibly small to me, but simultaneously too large to fathom. By young I mean the time when this poem takes place, so high … Continue reading Reclamation Part 4
Becoming Your Own God
"The God Who Loves You" by Carl Dennis In Genesis 2, God creates Adam and then tells him he’s free to eat from any tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for when you eat from it you will surely die.” I can’t remember how many different … Continue reading Becoming Your Own God
Reclamation Part 3
This is the third installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Here are links to parts 1 and 2. Slidell was a suburb when I lived there, a bedroom community. Most adults worked in New Orleans like my parents did. They drove the Twin Spans or Highway 11 across the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 3
Learning to Holiday
"The Cajun Night Before Christmas" by Trosclair If I do the math, I guess I've been celebrating Christmas now longer than I didn't, though I'm still not really comfortable with it. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and didn't leave the church until I was 26 but those are the years when you learn how … Continue reading Learning to Holiday
Reclamation Part 2
This is the second installment about “Reclamation,” a response poem to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Part 1 is here. We moved around a lot when I was young—by the time I started second grade I’d been in four schools in two states—but when we got to Slidell, we stayed. We moved there in the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 2
Search for community, search for beauty
"Seraphim" by Patricia Spears Jones The last time I took a fiction workshop I wrote a not very fictional story about a person leaving the only church he’d ever known and trying to work through the loss that came with the decision. It wasn’t a good story, but also the audience (my classmates) mostly didn’t … Continue reading Search for community, search for beauty
Reclamation Part 1
The story of Robert Frost’s appearance at John F Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 goes something like this. Frost had endorsed Kennedy during his presidential run, and Kennedy had used an adapted form of the final stanza of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as part of his stump speech. He reportedly would close it … Continue reading Reclamation Part 1
Sitting for a picture
from Unshuttered by Patricia Smith One of the first poems I ever published, way back when I was in high school, was about photographs. That might have been the title. I don’t exactly remember and fortunately for me, that poem has been lost to the passing of time. (Young people will never know how wonderful … Continue reading Sitting for a picture
Anchors Away
It’s 2004 and we’re living in San Francisco thanks to the generosity of the Stegner Fellowship and Stanford University but while the stipend is generous this is also San Francisco and even if it’s San Francisco during the brief lull in insane housing prices between the last dot-com bust and the next dotcom boom the … Continue reading Anchors Away
So Long and Thanks For All the Fish
No I'm not going anywhere. But the Vogons are coming.I want to say I was in 7th grade when I first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would have been around 1981-2 I guess. What I know certainly was that one of my friends read it first and passed it along to me, … Continue reading So Long and Thanks For All the Fish
Another Poem to Love 