Last Bender

Every now and again an upstart crow breaks free from the ivory tower and lands on the lawns of popular nonfiction. The usual fate for such books is to appear on coffee tables and on morning talk shows and this, Gynocracy and its Discontents, is no exception, more argued about than read, as it has [...]

Like most people I found my way to John Skelton because of Robert Graves. Because Skelton wore a gown embroidered with the name Calliope and kept a pet sow, and because he invoked the triple goddess on occasion, Graves was convinced he was a muse poet, which he might well have been. Skelton was a [...]

Sometime in 1999 I joined a writing group that subsequently called itself The Cascadilla Poets. Over the years I’ve been in many informal writing groups and they all degenerated into emotional brawls disguised as aesthetic or even ideological disputes. I guess the fact is most poets are unpleasant people. This group was entirely different. They [...]

I watch my babies climb across the nameless memories of this public grave their eager fingers burn the polished granite and engrave the plaques with flames beneath the hanging flags they ask and reach with throats of hungry fledglings all at once I can’t explain the dedication of these wars why a father leaves his home [...]

“I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey.” -David Bowie, Lady Stardust Finally, Endangered Species is done, or at least I have a complete draft to edit. It’s been eleven years since I first scribbled it out on my afternoon coffee breaks at Olin Library. I had just finished writing The Last Bender. [...]

I wrote this poem maybe 12 years ago. At the time I was in a poetry group. They all had problems with it, which is another way of saying they didn’t like the poem. They didn’t like any of my poems except for one. There was one poet in the group, an aggressive, self-righteous feminist [...]