How to celebrate Easter when you live alone and are only culturally Protestant, not a true believer in either the Christ or Passover myths? I woke up early, was delighted to be seemingly serenaded by the first brown thrasher (my favorite no…
How to celebrate Easter when you live alone and are only culturally Protestant, not a true believer in either the Christ or Passover myths? I woke up early, was delighted to be seemingly serenaded by the first brown thrasher (my favorite no…
It’s one thing to have work that you submitted appear in anthologies; it’s quite another to have your already published work selected for an anthology, without having to submit or ever know about it! You just get a polite request in your in…
Well deck the halls and call it a holiday! A terrifying new age of the self-repairing machine is nearly upon us and I persist in writing haiku and obscure erasure poems, published mainly on my own blogs. I persist, in other words, in the fa…
Almost any block of expressive English-language prose I’ve ever examined can be found to include one or more poems containing some reasonably sound and original insight, metaphor, or word-play. This is so persistently amazing to me as their…
I used to think that the main role of poetry was to preserve a space for insight and honest language in a society thoroughly steeped in propaganda, much of it as invisible to us as water presumably is to the fish who swim in it. Now I think…
I was recently honored to have a poem of mine selected for an ekphrastic, geographically-themed book-arts project called Uncharted Territories, in cooperation with the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey. If you are in any position to make c…
Starting January 1, 2013, I’ve been finding daily erasure poems in the 17th-century Diary of Samuel Pepys, and posting the results to Via Negativa. I use HTML to gray out the words I don’t use without completely erasing them, but I also pos…
A website I started as a birthday present to myself back in 2009 has somehow become the leading English-language website on videopoetry and poetry film, shared with a couple of co-editors. This is way more responsibility than I ever wanted,…
Once a week, I spend a day trawling through the poetry blogs and compiling a digest at Via Negativa (archives here), and since mid-2023, also at a dedicated blog on Substack called ReVerse. While I can of course only read a small selection
Haiga refers to the combination of haiku and image, something originally done with brush and ink but now just as commonly done with photographs and type fonts, which is my approach. I make haiga entirely on my phone, lately with Adobe’s fre…
Via Negativa Books, 2021 96 pages, 6″ x 9″ Softcover US $15.89 / UK £14.47 IndieBound / Bookshop.org / Amazon / Amazon UK / BookFinder.com Hardcover, imagewrap (i.e. no slipcover) US $28.00 / UK £20.19 available only through Blurb Digital (…