individual poems & translations

don’t tell me about your day. ever.

language is the music of the everyday and poetry raises the everyday spoken word to an attempt at beauty. it need not reflect on anything in particular or be for a purpose, although much of it certainly does and is these things, but it must seek to make language beautiful, enjoyable.

i am often asked whether it is ok to share my poetry with a class and if that’s a problem for duplication. if you teach poetry or literature and you’d like to use some of my work with your class, feel free to duplicate it — you can consider this written permission for that purpose. i am happy to speak or correspond with your students about anything they might happen to wish to ask, something that i have also often been requested to do. please don’t hesitate to be in contact!

i have found that it is difficult to find the type of poetry that i enjoy reading. i don’t want to hear about your daily life – not you specifically but anyone. i have no interest in reading word choice just because it sounds nice. and i don’t want to be shocked or terrified. i want beautiful images, interesting choice of words, and for the meaning to be clear – not necessarily concrete but if you make the reader work too hard, you are intentionally making it eletist, out of reach. i believe that the beauty of language is a dream that may be shared by everyone and an escape from the daily existence of the human condition that transcends the feeling of sunrise and sunset to infinity for brief moments. we may not live in poetry but we may visit and if that is a pleasant experience, we may often return.

most of the poetry that i have written has made its way into my published collections. if you look at the pages for each of those books, there are some samples of the work in each of them there. here, i share some of the poetry that i have written either for individual use, for musical settings or for a particular collection that isn’t one of my own, for magazines or compilations, for example.