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The Cusp of the Year by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist Look back: What have we learned from history? (Why do we have to repeat our screw ups?) Look ahead: Follow a path through “the yellow woods.” In November, my husband and I visited my hometown, Richmond,Continue Reading

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Winter Light by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist We are in the time of Phos hilaron, gracious light. Evening’s phosphorescence through skeletal trees arrives around 5:15. This light stuns, dazzles, illuminates. Do I love the day’s first light, or last light best? I can’t choose. I doContinue Reading

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Bravo Soulspeak! by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist Soulspeak was happening at The Rainbow Mountain School auditorium on State St. the last Saturday of September. There were too many empty seats! Where were you? This is a wonderful new venue for the Word. Congratulations to the schoolContinue Reading

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Cock-A Doodle by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist The roosters made me do it. Before “the cream of my brain has risen to the top” (as Virginia Woolf put it) my nest of pillows still warm, come the strangled cries. No one taught this bird the completeContinue Reading

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Sky Writing by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist It’s all because of clouds. Poets can’t help themselves. The names of clouds are poetry: Cirro-cumulus, Cumulo-nimbus, Nimbo-stratus, for example. Cirro means wisps of hair, the highest clouds. Cumulo means puffy, or heaped clouds, thunder-heads. (The kind I conjureContinue Reading

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The Poets Voice: August 2014 by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist My husband and I just returned from a visit to West Texas. I am grateful for Mary Oliver’s ‘wild and precious’ world. Yes, it exists in Texas. Our days were wind-dizzy; road side cactus prevalent. FlatContinue Reading

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Craft Heaven by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist The cusp: a potter at her wheel, wood turner at his bench, weaver and loom, blacksmith and forge, fiddler and fiddle, glass-maker and fire, writer and page. As I prepare to teach Crafting Words at the J. C. CampbellContinue Reading

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Not a Book Report by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist My bookcase has two shelves of books by single poets, (Akmatova – Zonatelli), one shelf of anthologies, two shelves of resources, one of biographies, and a shelf of children’s poetry. There are six other large bookcases inContinue Reading

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“Behold Me! I Am May!” by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Magazine Poetry Editor/Columnist Greetings Word Lovers, what are you working on today? Has Spring inspired a Villanelle, Sonnet, a greening blank verse, or a rap to Spring (zing! Pop! Plush! Sting!)? I imagine Wendell Berry is in his fieldContinue Reading