Poets love the sound of words.
The privilege of being the new Poetry Editor for this magazine carries a responsibility to our community of writers and readers. You know that old saying, “Crime doesn’t pay,” well, neither does poetry. Poets write because they can’t not write. I want to celebrate “the word” with you. Together, we will be rich!
I am learning to love a new world. Instead of Minnesota’s landscape of sky-reflecting lakes, I am living in the Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, near the French Broad River’s shoal-shallow banks. My poems sound the way I talk, using words like “veranda, magnolia,” that made me listen to myself when I said them in St. Paul. (No one says, “veranda or magnolia” in the Upper Mid-West.)
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, listening to my father quote Romance poets, and my mother sing. I hope to sing on the page. I began to write when grief put words in my mouth. My father died on my sixteenth birthday, and I began to write in green ink.
What makes you write? In Minnesota I wrote about clouds. Here, I sing of mountains.
Appalachian Meditation
Watching these mountains,
waiting for saints to sing,
listening for their thin voices
to pierce the cloud-wreathed shroud,
I hear the hills hidden heartbeat,
the lub-dub lub-dub of the green cathedral.
I stand beneath spruce spires, beech buttresses
and gargoyles: eagle, owl, mountain cat.
. . . . . . .
In the Coming Months…
I want to keep you in the loop about readings, festivals, new books, my favorite authors on writing, and also be the teacher I am called to be, introducing my “Poetry Toolbox” along the way.
I hope to interview Keith Flynn in April, (National Poetry Month) and review his book, Colony Collapse Disorder, and give you a heads up about Word Fest.