Erato is the muse of lyric poetry and she’s pitching a really ugly, jealous fit right now. Way out of scale, considering that it’s just little me ditching poetry for a time. As you might recall, I plan to devote this summer to writing fiction (actually rewriting fiction) and she’s taking my decision as…

As my writing friends know, I’m about to put the poems to bed for the summer and ease back into long fiction. For years I’ve had three novels sitting on the shelf and been avoiding them like guilty memories. Each one has a full draft, but not full enough. I’ve written in short forms for…

  Mean: shabby, of poor origin, hard to deal with. Or, excellent, skillful. Could go either way, but in the case of poems written by Thomas Lux, I mean the latter version of mean. He writes a mean poem. And sometimes he writes a dark and violent poem.”Quarrels with the world”–that’s what Lux called his…

    Ginger was a slightly neurotic, but lovely, Irish setter. A family pet, she spent her outdoor time in a large fenced pen in the back yard. As a family, we were too busy and too ignorant to keep her busy, but she entertained herself as best she could. One day at the kitchen…