He could be here. I always think that when I arrive at a residency, looking around for a youngish middle-aged man, maybe round glasses and an earring, battered leather jacket and jeans, Geoff’s standard college outfit. I’m guessing it might have been his adult one as well, at least some of the time. He could be a visual artist or sculptor, I think, perhaps a curator or an art historian—maybe a writer, he was so good at that too.
And sometimes I find him---as I did in this session at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I didn’t put it all together at first—that is often the way of these vivid synchronicities.
Read moreThat was a phrase I used in my eulogy for my mother, as a way to describe the space felt by such a loss, and I came across it again in an astoundingly good book I’ve just finished, Lost and Found, by Kathryn Shultz.
It seems like a perfect description of what we are all experiencing right now.
Everywhere we look there is absence. On our calendars, on grocery shelves, in our children’s classrooms, in restaurants and theaters, in the once-familiar texture of our days, in life as it used to be. The relentless disappearance of all we’ve long taken for granted is a fact with which we must reckon daily. We can no longer truly see each other, masked as we are—we struggle with the absence of spontaneity, the lack of joy, the unbalancing of constant uncertainty.
Read moreI’ve been waiting to write all of you about my new full-length collection of poems, The Glass Is Already Broken, until the publisher got the cover colors corrected. Three books later, that has not happened yet. The cover art by my dear friend Jarrod Beck keeps being reproduced in an orange-y tone rather than the clear yellow of the original; the lettering comes through as dark brown rather than black.
Read more“What are you going to do for your bonus day at Ucross?” Caitlin asked us as we traversed the winding road through the mountains from Sheridan back to Ucross after two canceled flights and a night at the Best Western. Caitlin was the communications director at Ucross, dispatched to bring Erica and I back to the comfort and safety of the Schoolhouse for the wait for tonight’s flight out to Denver.
Bonus day, indeed. Bonus days, really.
Read moreThis place. These weeks. These mountains. These new friends and colleagues. This respite from the pandemic. This room I’ve so fully occupied, replete with the books, pads and notebooks I brought with me, now all (mostly) read and reread, new poems tacked up on the cork strips near my desk, old and new poems mixed on the floor behind me, struggling towards a possible next collection—all now to become part of the past, another challenge to let go and move on to the next place.
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