Marzia Dessi is one of those people who seem to have done everything -- books, articles, poetry, presentations, studies. And still she has time to produce a literary journal, Otherwise Engaged. I was delighted to have three poems included in a one-time Special Spring Issue. Here's one of them:

Marigolds of Memory

I coaxed you from the earth from seed from sunlight and water to be my blazon my badge of light and you opened like a supernova sun-spike petals bursting from your still center Marigold of memory in my first flowerbed a child’s delight of dirt and expectation and then your spendthrift shower of garden gold a wealth of blossom for the plucking Deconstructed in the fall your seeds are sliver arrows packed tight in their quiver waiting for a wind to ride on thin tricolor shafts with flights of fire Herb of the sun Mary’s gold

Thanks, Marzia!

A Hundred to One

Years ago, a teacher told me to read 100 poems for each one I write. I’ll admit I don’t keep careful count, but I do read lots of poems, including those that show up daily in my email. Here are a few I turn to each morning:

• Poetry Daily, which includes not only a poem every day but a brief commentary on "What Sparks Poetry."
• Only Poems Daily, an independent magazine that says, "Wake up to a new poem every day and enjoy the slower life of poets."
• Poem-a-Day, brought to us by the Academy of American Poets, founder of National Poetry Month.
• Poetry Town, a daily newsletter from George Bilgere, who not only offers a different poem every day but tells us why he chose it.

There are others, of course, including an excellent email newsletter I've recently discovered: John Barr Poetry, which discusses aspects of poetry. A recent email, titled "The Work of New Language," had this to say about metaphor:

A metaphor shows the unwillingness of anything to stop with itself. A determination to turn soup to pudding. Fresh knowledge agitates a language. It requires words to serve new purposes -- first as metaphors (the surgeon feeling for the landmarks before the first incision), then as denotations, settled into the dictionary as if they had always belonged there. Emotion, by itself, does not do this. It repeats. It circles. The work of poets is something more difficult: to use knowledge to express emotion in new language -- to bring into being what did not previously exist in words, but was waiting there all along.

Want more? Try Barr's brief essay book The Subcutaneous Art.

A couple of cars ago, the family drove West … such a wide country, such wonderful vistas along the way. It was a great trip, but the drive back was something else again. I’ve thought of that drive often and finally wrote about it. Now a wonderfully handsome and impressive print journal called Midnight Mind published my poem “Flatland” in a section called “An Open Road Poetry Mix Tape (14 poems to recite on the open road.” You’d need to take a long drive to recite them all, but here’s mine.

Flatland

Spikes of lightning speared the earth as thunderstorms moved on the mountains. A tarantula cast a crook-leg shadow on the road ahead. Baked under a blazing sun and beguiled by the thorny plants that stood in for the trees of home we went on to Santa Fe with its picture postcard pueblos and up to Colorado ski country, then turned the Chevy East for home. But Kansas. Kansas stopped us with its mile on mile of featureless flatness. Not a tree or house in sight the horizon so wide you could almost see earth’s curve out there. I felt something at my back and thought of the pioneer wives running mad from wind and isolation not born to it like Kiowa and Comanche. At the next intersection we turned right trusting the road south to take us back to high country.

Many thanks to editor Brett Van Emst for including my poem in this special section.

A New Venture

Some months ago, I wrote about my friend Richard Eric Johnson and included “The Hurricane’s Eye,” one of his poems published in Vietnam War Poetry, an impressive online archive established by Paul Hellweg “to foster greater understanding of the Vietnam War and its impact on America, Vietnam, the veterans of both sides, and all people involved either directly or indirectly.” Since then, Eric suggested I apply to serve as poetry editor for that site.

It never occurred to me to seek such a position … and I have no real knowledge of the Vietnam War or indeed, any military action. But here I am, VWP poetry editor. And I’ve even taken on editing a chapbook by a friend of the site’s founder.

In a time of discord and division, what lies ahead? That’s the question behind America’s Future, an anthology of poetry and prose from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House that speaks to joy and resilience amidst today’s political turmoil, according to a review in Poets & Writers.

The volume opens with remarks by U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin from an April rally on the National Mall. A collaboration between E. Ethelbert Miller and Miho Kinnas is the first poem in the book:

To Write Is to Flower

We use the dictionary to cut the stems of our poems. Inside the vase they blossom paying attention to prepositions. At night petals fall like adjectives. A stanza begins to reminisce about the past. Elders spoke of a time when people cut flowers with their tongues It is a time to remember the milky liquid that leaked from the stalks. The future sticks to our fingers calling us to write and to flower.

A total of 164 writers contributed to America’s Future, offering a breadth of responses from joy to sorrow, from despair to rage. A sobering but inspiring read.

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No matter what you think about the future, the nation’s capital is a good place for poetry. Not only is the Washington Writers’ Publishing House the longest continuously operating nonprofit literary small press in the U.S., but the Federal Poets is the oldest continuously active poetry group in the Washington D.C. area. The Federal Poet is published twice a year, and I was lucky enough to be included in the Summer 2025 edition (thanks, Jonathan Lewis).

Cosmology 101

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel — New York Times, 9/3/23

Just when we believe we understand how things work, there’s something new something else to scrutinize something that keeps us growing And now the wondrous Webb telescope is challenging our view of it all Look at me, says a very distant galaxy, I’m older by far than you can imagine Look how quickly I formed, says the galaxy, much earlier than you can contemplate Time to rethink what you think you know This is the universe calling, reminding us there’s always more to learn

A defining event in the life of most people my age was the Vietnam War. Whether you fought or marched, it was a crucial time in our lives and in the history of the United States. My friend Richard Eric Johnson has written powerful poems about his time in Vietnam. His work is archived in LaSalle University’s Connelly Library and online in Vietnam War Poetry, an impressive archive established by Paul Hellweg. Here’s one of Eric’s poems from that collection:

The Hurricane’s Eye

Richard Eric Johnson

out of the blue white puffy clouds ever higher the towering lightning filled black night heart shaking storm no way around above or beneath into the eye of I and we courage calling courage needed courage in question through the eye past perimeters of storm we flew into the aftermath war zone the hurricane’s eye a singular moment tranquility remembered

Eric has compiled a stunning manuscript of poems about the war and its aftermath in his life, a manuscript I expect will soon be snapped up by a savvy publisher.

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Well, it’s still beating and now that I’m well into my 80s, I have to pay attention to such routine matters. So do the doctors, who gave me a variety of tests last year before I went through a minor surgery. One of the tests is the subject of this poem, which was published in Grey Matter: An Anthology of Contemporary Medical Poems by the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix.

Nuclear Test

Sally Zakariya

I thought it meant exploding a bomb in some far distant corner of the earth. But for this old body it means injecting a noxious liquid then watching through a whirring, rumbling machine to see how my newly stressed heart behaves. Normal, they say. But what’s normal about stockpiling horror and threatening war? What’s normal about wielding dread and the fear of fallout? In this hospital, this microcosm of the globe, peace reigns—for now.

Thank you, Grey Matter. I’m delighted to be in your first print anthology.