… Voyages III Infinite consanguinity it bears This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, […]
Tag Archives: spoken word
Sonnet for Rosa Parks
… Out of the ordinary there will come from time to time the good and very brave extraordinary, someone who can save us from our own damned selves and make us one humanity. Children take Rosa Parks for an example, a common seamstress who sat […]
In my words, April 8 – 14
… On Friday, as I walked down 2nd Avenue in the rain coming back from the gym—after some laps in the pool (my crawl is getting better, less pain in the muscles in my left arm each time I move), holding on to a rusty […]
Fucking I: I will come to you with a candle burning
… Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant. …………—Apollinaire Open this door where I knock weeping. I I will come to you with a candle burning light a stick of incense comb and braid your hair with sparrows’ feathers gathered from the sidewalk cinnamon, […]
Fucking II, part II: Poet Laundromat: I see a Tiajuana donkey leans
… Poet Laundromat was published with the help of Stephen Spera & Philadelphia Eye & Ear Press in 1983. It comes from a long poem I was working on called Fucking, but it took its own form from the larger poem and became itself. … […]
Poetry Lesson: Fog by Carl Sandburg
… What follows is an ESL lesson I use with Fog by Carl Sandburg. I present it from the point of view of a teacher talking. The objective is to get the student writing, and that process is divided into three parts. Students first examine […]
Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson: A closer look at and a lesson for an ESL teacher
… I love and yet have mixed feelings about a poem by Emily Dickinson, but it doesn’t stop me from using it in a poetry lesson for students who are learning the English language. I let the class memorize the first stanza to exercise their […]
Archive Three: Little Caesar
… I’ve been going through cardboard boxes at my father’s house and have found a lot of old magazines and letters from friends I forgot that I had. Some have not survived the mice. Fresh Paint’s been nibbled on but has lived to tell the […]
Sonnet 5: When I think of all the lovers I’ve had
… When Bill Kushner heard I was writing sonnets, Bill being Bill asked me if I had written any with sex in them. I hadn’t. Bill suggested, “Why don’t you?” This sonnet was my first attempt, more philosophical than erotic. … … When I think […]
Sonnet 2: anti-Iraqi War sonnet
One of my favorite spots in the woods is Walnut Run, where a stream rushes from its springs in rocky waterfalls down the South Mountain making its way to the Susquehanna River and finally the Chesapeake Bay. Winter and spring it’s pretty easy to get […]
Yangtze Sonnet: 135
… I took a trip through the Three Gorges in August of 2006 after teaching classes at the University of Wuhan for the month of July. I went with some of my teacher colleagues. Here is the first sonnet on the Yangtze that I jotted […]
Dusk by Ruiqi Liu
When I first met Rich, the summer of 2008, I thought she was very shy, but I also knew she was confident enough to give me a poem she had written for a class assignment. Like most of my poets, she’s a scientist, pharmaceutical […]
