Happy Earth Day, Happy Record Store Day, and happy 22nd day of Sonnetachella. It’s been a long festival, but it’s yielded fruit. Today’s offering is perhaps more truthfully the 26th sonnet I’ve scribbled out this month, but I am trying not to rest on my laurels, as evidenced by the trilogy of sonnets for AprilContinue reading “#463: I saw myself when a friend posted this . . .”
Tag Archives: gratitude
Who’s Counting? Two
Courtesy of The Fact Site, the number 2 is the first prime number, and it’s either the third or fourth number in the Fibonacci sequence–and that’s significant because math is beautiful and everywhere. Courtesy of Three Dog Night, “2 can be as bad as 1; it’s the loneliest number since the number 1,” followed byContinue reading “Who’s Counting? Two”
#362: Small Pleasures: A List
Dogs sleeping together. These birds in the back, from every bird a different song. The “who” of that dove. We’ve never had doves and now we have a dove. Squirrels being squirrels. Animals reclaiming Yosemite, lions asleep in the streets in South Africa. Air that’s good to breathe. The clerk at the liquor store who callsContinue reading “#362: Small Pleasures: A List”
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year: June 12, 2018
Please excuse my absence. After 30 poems over the 30 days of April, one needs a little rest. But on top of all that, I’ve been having a transformative experience. On Sunday, May 20, I came down from the mountaintop. My hair turned white and now looks blown back by a great force of energyContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year: June 12, 2018”
Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Resurrection of the Contest in Order to Exacerbate Feelings of Rejection, a Dongle Dilemma, When a Poem is Not a Poem, One Bad Dream, and More Blessedness.
Things started out kind of rowdy here at Mt. Holyoke. The microphone was wonky. There’s nothing worse than a wonky microphone. Better no microphone than a wonky one. One of our attendees was trapped in his room by tables of books. But he’s got the only refrigerator in the entire building in his roomContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Resurrection of the Contest in Order to Exacerbate Feelings of Rejection, a Dongle Dilemma, When a Poem is Not a Poem, One Bad Dream, and More Blessedness.”
Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Sermon on the Mount Holyoke
Blessed are the writers who have arrived at Mount Holyoke College to participate in the 2017 Warren Wilson MFA Program Alumni Conference, for they are lucky bastards, and I feel truly blessed and lucky to be here among them. Blessed is the writer who takes the red-eye flight out of Portland at midnight, sleeps throughContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Sermon on the Mount Holyoke”
#282: On the Last Day of National Poetry Writing Month, The Poet Speaks of Things that Happen Over and Over Again
Days go by, and they keep going by constantly pulling you into the future. –Laurie Anderson. For starters, days go by one right after another, but today, during meditation, I held my father’s hand one last time before they wheeled him into surgery on the eve of his last day on the planet 7Continue reading “#282: On the Last Day of National Poetry Writing Month, The Poet Speaks of Things that Happen Over and Over Again”
#269: A Letter of Gratitude to My Wife and Son (another prose poem)
Dear family, I am about to begin my journey home. Almost everything is put away and the trailer is hitched up (I never did unhitch); all I have to do now is climb in and start up the engine. It was a good trip. Even though I was with my brother and his friends, I spentContinue reading “#269: A Letter of Gratitude to My Wife and Son (another prose poem)”
#230: A Poem of Gratitude
Happy Thanksgiving, America. Here’s a skinny but long list of things for which I am grateful: It’s not January. I could do without the heavy rain making a mud bath of the lawn, but at least, the leaves are finally out of the yard. My son is healthy and, as far as I can tell, happy.Continue reading “#230: A Poem of Gratitude”
A Single Dispatch from Writer’s Camp on the 40th Anniversary of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
First of all, I was sick with a cold when at 10:30 pm I boarded the plane for a red-eye from Portland to Atlanta, a nearly five hour flight through most of which I would be sneezing and blowing and stuffing kleenex into my own private trash bag that I kept discreetly stuffed into theContinue reading “A Single Dispatch from Writer’s Camp on the 40th Anniversary of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College”
michael jarmer 