Category: Poetic living
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Earth Songs and the Machines that Mediate Between
Lead vocalist of Wardruna Einar Selvik said at their show at Red Rocks Amphitheater last October that there used to be a song for everything: sowing seeds, picking herbs, brewing beer. The song connected action with self, and the living entities we were working with (e.g, seeds, herbs, grains in beer). How deep do we Read more
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Honoring Stories, Honoring Our Humanity: Thinking About Close Reading
Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and Read more
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Brave Enough to Admit We’re Lost: Finding Self to Find Community
In early 2025 I had the privilege of hearing Clint Bowman read from his new book of poems, If Lost, at Poetry Hickory, a monthly poetry reading with featured poet followed by an open mic. Bowman explained he organized his book as a sort of guide for someone lost, with three sections that act as Read more
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Earthed by Light: Response to Sylee Gore’s chapbook Maximum Summer
Despite the heat in Sylee Gore’s chapbook of poems Maximum Summer, the book holds a cold dark, the baby being fitted with clothes knitted while the speaker is on commute, always the breeze pushes leaves of the sycamore, blue light is a cool light, and the images in her poems only expose flashes of life Read more
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Have You Hugged Your Poem Today? (Who Are We Writing For?)
John O’Donohue says in Eternal Echoes: “Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how” (p. 186). When I originally wrote this quote down in my journal, I was spending time thinking about the value of understanding Read more
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When Our Forests Stop Breathing
A student in my college writing class this semester turned his essay exploring how wolves are essential to maintaining balance in ecosystems into a fairy tale. The prompt, as part of the class’s final portfolio, was to remix something written in the class from one format to another format, thus exploring how the message both Read more
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Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Revision as Receptivity for Depth and Change
Revision: “making a subsequent draft better than a previous one.” But what does “better” mean when I’m trying to ground myself in “writing as a way of being” or “writing for writing’s sake” and not writing with an end-goal, a linear, teleological purpose? How do I adopt a purposeless purposefulness? The more I have written Read more
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From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly Read more
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We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the Read more
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Dogmagic Poetry: Hiking Sketches, August 2024
Feeling washed out as the footbridge across Hoyle Creek Tributary. Its sand banks are slippery and soft, so the dog and I inch down to cross the slow flow that had just recently flooded. Mushrooms dot the forest floor from recent rain, all colors of them: white, orange, rust, yellow, red. The white ones are Read more