So I'm terrible at keeping this website up-to-date.  I'd rather write poems, submit poems, blab about poems online...  yeah, I still care about prose (and the YA fiction I've written), but lately, poetry has stolen my whole heart.

It always had it, really. I started writing poems when I was seven.  I wrote an elegy to JFK when he was murdered and sent it to Jackie.  I was eleven and one of her secretaries sent me a thank you letter.  At the time I felt a little embarrassed; it seemed such a childlike thing to have done and I wanted to be a grown-up even then.  But I think the impulse to write--to tell stores or form poems--IS childlike.  The "adulting" part is the po-biz.  Blog updating.  Wondering if I should move this whole show to Substack or something.  That stuff.

Oh--and poetry EDITING.  Cast your eyes leftwards.  I'm the new poetry editor at Eclectica Magazine.  They are a venerable online lit mag that also publishes travel pieces, fiction, and humor.  They were one of the first serious places I published back when they were starting out and I was still teaching poetry in the public schools--the better part of thirty years ago.  I'll let you know when the decisions I'll be starting to make this very afternoon go live--it'll be a little while, but I can't tell you how happy I am about this.  Eclectica's a solid mag that nominates for Pushcart and has a history of publishing really good people.

Also (but wait!  there's more!) you're probably reading this after the fact, but I'm the featured poet on Rattlecast--tomorrow night, June 23rd, eight EDT.

I've been on Rattlecast before, because I often manage to get a political commentary kinda poem in Rattle magazine's ongoing Poets Respond feature online.  Clicky click on the red-dy red to see the most recent one.  Editor TIm Green, bless him, decided to feature me this week.  So I'm not the warmup act anymore!  I have a bunch of poems, largely from Unforgetting, my most recent collection, that I'm going to read. You can get it at the 'Zon, or I should have a box of books from my publisher soon, and I'll sign one to you.

So yeah, I'm smiling. There's proof over to the right.  Also I copped out and cut my hair.  So it goes.

A few recent publications: Grain Magazine (from Canada!). That one is forthcoming.  Here's one from SWIMM about hearing Dizzy Gillespie in a place you wouldn't expect him to be. And here's a batch from Does It Have Pockets?  There's work forthcoming also from Tar River.  OH--and this dear-to-my-heart poem ran in ONE ART.  I'll leave you with a poem about my dearest ambition--being the winner of Fat Bear Week--from BOOTH Magazine.