My Poetry on the Web

The Beloit Poetry Journal (BPJ) has published many of my poems. They've also created a web-based archive of past issues. Here are some links to poems of mine that have appeared there. Most are in pdf format--be patient while they load.

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The Adolescence of Orpheus
This poem was featured in "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror," edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (2002). It's a take on the life of Orpheus before he got married to Eurydice.
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At the Home for Retired Piano Teachers
A humorous look on that petty tyrant of childhood, the neighborhood piano teacher.
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Beard on Vacation: Beach
A playful poem about waking up next to one's beloved on a beach vacation (though in reality there was no beloved, beach, or vacation, only the beard--oh well).
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Chaco Canyon
Probing an ancient mystery: What happened at the thousand-year-old ruins of New Mexico's famous Chaco Canyon, causing a huge empire that lasted several centuries to collapse?
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Driving through New Mexico
In which the poet, surrounded by the beauties of the New Mexican desert, suffers a crisis of faith (to which poets seem all too often prone).
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Entrance
Inspired by the entryway of a house in western Connecticut where the late sculptor Paul Suttman lived with his wife. Paul had decorated it with plaster casts of his work, turning it into an installation-like work of art.
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Epitaphs from "New Mexican Cemetery"
These epitaphs are the imagined voices of people buried in a cemetery I visited in Taos, New Mexico, talking about how they lived and died.
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From "Ambient Noise"
A series of seven poems, excerpted from a longer series of fifteen, about how music weaves itself around our emotional and spiritual life.
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The Garden Sibyl
The widow of sculptor Paul Suttman turned the grounds of their western Connecticut home into a sculpture garden displaying his work. I was intrigued by a piece called "Still Life with Fruit," which looked very different from a distance.
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Museum Pieces
Inspired by a visit to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. The traveling exhibition described in the second part featured works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).
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New Mexican Cemetery
This is the other part of my "New Mexican Cemetery" sequence, in which a chorus of the dead speak to me, the poet, about what they have to teach us about language and life.
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Remedies
This poem, based on the whimsically dreamlike paintings of the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-63), won the BPJ's first Chad Walsh Award in 1993. It was reprinted in "A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal" (2000).