Goose Hill

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...