Goose Hill

  These Silence of the Lambs poems of mine have always been especially rooted in the visual. Even when the poem series was just an idea, I had imagined the words side-by-side with illustration. But I am not a visual artist and I let this self-knowledge stop me from attempting this parallel path for a while. Thankfully there are poets like Matthea Harvey and Kristy Bowen who show how this line can be crossed by the poet and in tandem with the poem. Matthea, with her mermaid-appliance silhouettes and her photographs of miniatures. Kristy, with her collages combining the mid-century housewife with the carnivalesque with the natural world. Their approaches to their visual art are so intertwined with their poetic styles and subjects that they make the perfect complements to each other. Because I think collage is, essentially, the predominant principle guiding my creative style (even in writing poetry — especially for this specific poem series), I finally realized that ...

Some great news to begin the dead-damn-dog days of August: two of my Silence of the Lambs poems have been accepted for publication at the fantastic Tinderbox Poetry Journal !  "Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling?" and "Look at him, Starling. Tell me what you see." will be appearing in a future Tinderbox issue. I'll let you know when they're up. The latter poem will also be included in the next poetry anthology in the Literary House Press series, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse . So much to look forward to. So far, this has been a fairly productive poetry-writing summer. I'm hoping to eke a few more out before we hit September, which looms ever closer and taunts me with thoughts of crisp golden days, and long chilly nights. Happy August, poetry-friends!

toes in the cold Sound I spent this past week in Madison, Connecticut with my friend and colleague Jehanne Dubrow at the inaugural Poetry By the Sea Conference . It was a fun, relaxing poetry vacation along the Long Island Sound. I spent some time on the shell-covered beach with my toes in the cold salt water. I collected a fistful of tiny, intricate shells the way I loved to do as a kid. I spent time inside and outside just working on a poem. I even managed to finish my latest Silence of the Lambs poem on the train ride back. a Sound sonnet, by Jo Yarrington I took the workshop on hybrid forms and artistic collaboration with the lovely Terri Witek and her visual artist collaborator Cyriaco Lopes. I really enjoyed the playfulness of the workshop and the wonderful poets and visual artists I met there. One of my fellow students, Jo Yarrington , completed a beautiful project: a Sound sonnet, a sonnet without words. It is 14 lines of translucent shells that attempt to approximat...

After trading chapbooks/books with my new poetry friend Laura Madeline Wiseman at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis, she interviewed me as part of her blog series on the chapbook. You can read it here ! I am so grateful to Madeline for including me in this fun series because I just love chapbooks. And I always discover more about my own thoughts and feelings about a thing when I am forced to find words to describe them. Things like this:  "My chapbook experiment forced me to push past the mystery that I like to leave my poems suspended within. I had to find answers to the poetic questions I posed. The interconnectedness of these poems also made them very dependent upon each other for meaning and context, which meant that they lost some of their potency if presented as individual poems (say in a literary journal or anthology). This could be considered a weakness in the poems, but gathered together in their intended sequence in a chapbook, they seem to form one bigger an...

If you followed any of my Twitter or Facebook updates during AWP Minneapolis, you'll have noticed that there was quite a bit going on within the confines of the Convention Center and hotel and the sheltering skyways in between: There was The Rose O'Neill Literary House table in the Bookfair , #1724!  Poet Matt Rasmussen signed the entire edition of Literary House Press's 2015 AWP Commemorative Broadside , a collaboration with Water~Stone Review which featured his poem "Outgoing." I attended fantastic and absorbing panel discussions about "New Trends in Literary Publishing," "The Rise of the Chapbook," "The Bigness of the Small Poem," and "Fascinated or Haunted: Why We Continue to Write & Rewrite Fairy Tales." All topics that are important and exciting to me. And I took lots of notes!  And probably most exciting of all was our official Cherry Tree Launch Party at the Hyatt Regency! What a fabulous evening that...

Despite my cumulative exhaustion from the nonstop busyness at the fabulous Rose O'Neill Literary House (have I mentioned how much I love my awesome job?), I am very much excited about the upcoming literary & publishing frenzy at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis. For a good chunk of the Conference, you will be able to find me at the Literary House table in the Bookfair, with all of our fantastic Literary House Press and Cherry Tree  wares and paper goods I will be on-duty at Table 1724 for the following times: Thursday, April 9  from 9:00-10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 9  from noon-1:30 p.m.    Friday, April 10  from noon-1:30 p.m.   Friday, April 10  from 4:30-5:45 p.m. And then on Thursday night, April 9 from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis (1300 Nicollet Mall), I will be at the official  Cherry Tree  Launch Party ! Inaugural issue contributors Juliana Gray , Dore Kiesselbach , Bruce Sni...

Last month I experienced a flash of poetic clarity that delivered itself signed and sealed care of one of my favorite horror movie classics: The Silence of the Lambs . During my probably twenty-seventh viewing, that steady refrain of "Starling" throughout the script just lit up all over the dialogue for me, her name/species bouncing from the mouths of male mentor/villain Hannibal Lecter to male mentor/hero Jack Crawford. These lines addressing "Starling" over and over seemed to me the perfect jumping-off points for a new mini-series of poems, addressing Agent Clarice Starling as both young woman in a male-dominated world chasing a killer of women and small bird eluding threats both wild and domestic. These lines will become my poem titles and these poems will be nested inside the Catechesis manuscript as a different variation on the same themes I've already been writing toward. Here are the movie lines I have gleaned so far to use for these poem titles: ...