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The A-Frame
The A-FrameDaddy is an early riser. Always has been. Long before there was a fitness craze, he would jog a half hour before he’d eat his daily pan of oatmeal mush. As his knees aged, cycling replaced...
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A student approached a colleague after class one day. The day’s lesson in English as a Second Language had been on some difficult grammatical concept native speakers take for granted, sequence of...
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It's Like Epic Man
Nights are long around the fire. Winters especially. The sun’s gone down early, you’re sitting on a charred rock chewing on wild goat jerky wishing there were something on tv, wishing you could update...
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Dido's Fire
I did not love epic poetry at first sight. But by the time Dido stabbed herself on top of her own funeral pyre, I was hooked. I was studying Latin by accident, really, through a long set of changes in...
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Satan Started It
It’s difficult for me to specify the difference between the epic and the verse novel. The first is one of the world’s oldest art forms. Cave paintings maybe came before, but maybe not. Many would argue...
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The First Glowing Refusal
The world of poetry publishing is not really good at saying no. Don’t get me wrong: they reject people all the time. The thing is they rarely get around to telling anyone about it. I can’t tell you how...
View ArticleA Starting Point
I stumbled across a list of verse novels not long after I’d finished the National Novel Writing Month marathon that ended in the prose version of Constance, Or . The 50,000-word manuscript written for...
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The Miners’ Verse Novel—Ludlow by David Mason
Two of my favorite verse novels, Sugar Mile and Ludlow are fictionalizations of read historical events. I’ll get to Sugar Mile soon, but first I’ll briefly touch on Ludlow.The 1914 massacre of miners...
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Dickens by candlelight--Day Two
It gets very dark very early Novembers in Reykjavik. We were there only for four days, but the time was shortened even more by the daylight and by its constraints. Daylight is of little consequence in...
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Will It Make Me Go Blind?
One of my favorite literary characters.Dickens by candlelight--Day ThreeSomehow the romance of reading one of Dickens’ longest novels entirely by candlelight overshadowed (pardoned the pun) the...
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Will It Help Me Survive an Act of Nuclear Terror?
Pictured: bricked in fireplace, one BBB pillar candle (ivory) and a beat-up mirror someone threw outDickens by candlelight--Day Four On 134 page of 852. Bleak House experiences its first suspicious...
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You Want Me to Put Your Poetry Where?
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No Night Could be Darker Than This Night
For the first time in 372 years, a lunar eclipse coincided with the Winter Solstice. I watched it out of my window looking at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem, the Gothic Shepard Hall of the City College of...
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On Breadmaking as a Metaphor for the Love of God
My good friend, Mark, drew my attention to this poem by Rumi. I had forgotten this wonderful piece. Leave it to a Persian to make you feel insecure, even one from the 8th Century:@font-face {...
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Am I possessed? Dickens by candlelight--the Experiment Continues
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Dickens by candlelight--Day Twenty
A key character in Bleak House died recently of spontaneous combustion. I was surprised to find that, in fact, spontaneous combustion has some grounding in fact! (Dickens reminds his readers of this in...
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Two Occasional Poems
Check out two poems in a new literary journal. One, "The Flannel Lord," is the title poem of my manuscript of short poems currently in search of a loving publisher.Here is the link to the journal:...
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Summer Reading
A return to the world of my blog after a very long hiatus. I thought I'd try to record one of my published pieces that you can find at the following link: St Sebastian ReviewIf you notice something...
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The Tree and the Boathouse
The 14th of December is my sister’s birthday. It is Christmas Tree Day. We’ll pull the old plastic thing out of the windshield box covered in a year of dust. No older. We keep it back of the boathouse,...
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