I have written poems in bursts, in waves, in cycles. A bunch during my first two years in Louisville Kentucky, beginning with an open-mic during Gay Pride 1994, continuing with a couple of informal poetry groups, and then ending abruptly in 1996. There have been a few poems scattered across the last decade.
At the end of June 2025, I was at a poetry workshop led by Richard Blanco at Maine Media - The Photographic Poem. I was looking for a way to more deeply enter the photographs I've been making. It was that and more - lessons in craft, the seven of us participants working on poems from family photos and other inspirations, early mornings walks along the harbor as the lobster boats came in to load up with empty traps; a time and place to nurture some seeds.
Below are links to all the poems.
Recent Poems
Silent Running (31 July 2025/June 1994)
Arthur and Larry and Larry and Arthur (28 July 2025)
The Past Enters the Present (10/23 July 2025)
From The Photographic Poem Workshop, 2025
Devil’s Rope, Laramie, 1998 (28/30 June 2025)
Portrait of a Shipwrecked Invader (26 June/7 July 2025)
Sonya at Sixteen (25 June 2025)
A Scattering over the Years
Weeping Through a Deep Hairline Crack (6 March 2025)
making love to this emerging tender indestructible being (11 February 2023)
What the Camera Saw (25 February 2021)
My Thoughts (6 January 2019) - My poem is buried in a page full of other things.
Published on The Point in 1997
I had a website with hand-coded HTML in my user space at thepoint.net starting in 1997, early but not that early in Internet history. I'd been a consumer of online content since the bulletin board days of the 1980s. I found evidence of my desire to become a content producer in a sketchbook from September 1997. The burst of energy that led to the poems had already ended by the time they were posted. I shut down that first website in the early 2000s. These poems have been assembled into a chapbook. They are reposted in 2025 with their original dates of composition, listed from oldest to newest.
Thank you, Louisville (7 June 1994)
Silent Running (31 July 2025/June 1994) This poem was written in 2025, recalling an important moment during that first month in Louisville, a painful time of leaving the old and not yet in the new. I was not acknowledging how difficult that summer was. It feels necessary to include this to more fully present my life then.
Pittsburgh Airport (24 November 1994)
Just Below the Surface (24 November 1994)
Dinner with Pete (11 February 1995)
Early Spring (12/20 March 1995)
Easy to Connect (19 June 1995)
The Language of Life (9 August 1995) - An acrostic poem written for a contest that it did not win.
Two Poems for Jim (12 August 1995) - I had not met Jim. He was the close friend of someone I knew through a listserv. I imagined being with him, with those last breaths. A personal need to be with dying.
Naked Breath / Tim Miller (9 September 1995) - Written in the afterglow of Tim Miller's performance at Actors Theatre.
Second Thoughts (1 March 1996) - Two more poems for Jim.
A Day of Poetics (16 March 1996)
Two Mathematicians (17 June 1996) - Inspired by a story published in Evergreen Review. (Not Evergreen Review. Evergreen Review had ceased publication. Published somewhere else. A misremembering that is now part of the meta story of this poem.)
No Two Dicks Are The Same (26 June 1996) - Blogger first flagged this for content and 7 hours later said it was OK. Go figure.
Pearls! (26 December 1996) - This was not posted to The Point and exists only in my memory. Nonetheless, the photograph is evidence and inspiration.
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