Today, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book released the video of Poems from Life, a celebration of the lives of men and women living at Juniper Village. Juniper is a senior living center near State College, Pennsylvania. For the second year, staff at the Pennsylvania’s Center for the Book worked with Juniper to partner poets … More Poems from Life and “A Man Who Came Home”: Videos of our readings
POTD #11: Forest world is word New named man hears the howlers rising with the sun A canopy of silhouettes. River water splashes. Caiman stalks the capybara. Unblinking anaconda waits. New named man knows his brothers, wears their wares, models their gaits, for ancestry lives in the hallowed wold. The word for world is forest … More PotD #11: Forest world is word.
PotD #6: Cinders in the Gloaming Lightning splits the parched air, drier than since the ancients walked ridgelines cobbled by eons of wear. The conflagration bellows and rends the ancestors asunder. It thrusts worry into her nose, lungs, and belly. Terror spews from the mouths of the beasts on two legs, their children spitting cinder … More PotD #6: Cinders in the Gloaming
POTD #5: The Flood (revised) The flood strips soil, roils brown waters saturated with brine and invective. The flood yanks boulders, heaves and hews them. The flood rises, tears hemlocks, uproots rhodies and a stern sycamore that bursts the door. The flood pours through windows across the floor and sweeps away the heartwood, our bed … More POTD #5: The Flood (revised)
THE FLOOD the flood, this giant flood, it’s flooding everything and throwing sandstones coated in gray-brown water the flood, this giant flood, it’s flooding everything and stripping soil, yanking stone, heaving and hewing, and roiling, the dark waters carry brines of invective, glances and sneers gouging bark of the trees we planted by the cold … More POTD #2: The Flood
Go down to the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania in State College! They’re exhibiting illustrations by J. Harlan Ritchey including the front piece on my book, Heartwood, published by Mt. Nittany Press, an imprint of Eifrig Publishing. Heartwood considers what it means to be human in the Anthropocene—the age of humans. By rapidly reconstituting the atmosphere, … More Heartwood & J. Harlan’s art at the Art Alliance in State College
My father died seven years ago today. He loved woven words. They were the closest sound to divinity for him. In them and through them, he connected to our family, his friends and colleagues, and thousands of students. It was a testament to his passion for language and connection that so many of those students … More Woven words were the closest sounds to divinity. Seven years on, I miss you dad.
silent sentinel barred owl leaf shadow dappled crossed crooked rock creek [Yesterday I saw a barred owl in Yellow Creek State Park while I was mountain biking.]
Revision number I-don’t-know-how-many of a poem once called “Wreckage.” JUST A TOY Plebes engineered in programs, poured into progress’s molds, preached from the altered world’s altars, scriptures of innovation, new epics of a dawning world. Cybernetic Prometheus’ motherboard liver waits to be torn from his body by the eagle. The eagle, winged justice cites dynamic … More JUST A TOY
GORDIAN KNOT Don’t I fear this Gordian knot’s invictus grip wickedly woven, wickedly thick wound threads? El Nino’s therms? Patricia’s whip? La peste! Les marteau sans maître! There is no hope for us to unravel it, just our own hours of onerous unraveling. Could it be that we, like Alexander, face one option the option … More Gordian Knot: A poem on the most wicked of wicked problems
Peter Walks for Democracy 