In 1991 poet/critic Dana Gioia asked “Can Poetry Matter?” His essay ran in The Atlantic and drew attention by the bucketful. That essay became the title piece for a book by the same name and I am rereading it this week. I was tidying my book shelves and felt the pull of his question. It’s…

A copy of Natalie Goldberg’s memoir, Long Quiet Highway, is on top of my current stack of books and it will stay there, I suspect, for quite a while. I don’t know how long it’s been since I first read it, but this copy now has many, many underlined passages and marginal notes. I did…

I obsess about writing, even about when, where and on what I write. I feel anxious if I leave home without the tools to write at the drop of a thought. For me this means a portable journal–stitched or bound so I don’t lose pages–a fast pen/pencil and a place to sit. I write on…

A poem for you, recently part of the Boulder Valley UU Fellowship poetry service:   MARTYRS AND WORMS Worms don’t volunteer to be flooded from home, to feed the hungry robin.   No cathedral rises in honor of worms, no beatification of night crawlers. Saint Worm slays no dragons, writes no treatise on the meaning…

  What are the odds of playing the exact same game of Solitaire twice? Given 52 cards, it’s beyond my wimpy powers of calculation. I play Solitaire a lot. It’s my go-to avoidance trick but this morning I was noodling around with it and it struck me that as much as I play, the random…