After I finished graduate school in 2007, I wanted to sustain the momentum of being part of a literary community. I joined Poetry Center San Jose and edited their literary journal, Caesura, for two years. We ran a contest in 2009 and Connie Post won first place, which was wonderful because I got to deliver the good news! Now I work for Poetry Center doing publicity and writing grants. In October, we brought Jane Hirshfield to San Jose for a reading and workshop and we continue to support our monthly reading series at the Willow Glen Library, which features local poets and a very popular open mike. I started a Facebook page for Poetry Center and keep looking for ways to promote poetry as an important part of the South Bay arts scene. I’m grateful to the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs and Arts Council Silicon Valley for their support of Poetry Center’s programs.

 

 

As soon as you have between 30-40 poems, the majority of which have been published individually, you should start thinking about creating a poetry collection. Putting the book together was a labor of love for me. I can follow my development as a poet through those early poems, and look back on the things I was doing and thinking about when I wrote them. In a way, they function as a kind of autobiography or journal. I had great fun working with Howard Partridge, who took the photograph I chose for the cover. The image on the cover defines the book in ways I could not have anticipated; when I think about the book, I see the cover first and then the poems.

 

The hard part is sending the book out and waiting for a response. I sent it to 15 contests and publishers before I heard back from Finishing Line. This process took about six months, not that long in the poetry world.

 

 

Personally, I will not review any book that I don’t like. I am not going to give anyone a bad review. My reviews are my way of giving back to poetry, and to the community of poets who labor so often in obscurity. The more people read and review poetry, the more poets will get attention from the rest of the world. I also review poetry books because I enjoy it, although reviewing also gives me a chance to read a book for more than my own pleasure; I want to bring out the qualities of a book that move me the most and will hopefully get people interested in the writer.

 

As a reader, I look for reviews that introduce me to a new poet. I am always delighted to find a poet I hadn’t heard of before and spread the word about her or him. I don’t like reviews that are not respectful or are obviously a vehicle for the reviewer and not the poet. And finally: there’s an art to reviewing, and reviews should stand on their own as examples of good writing.

 

 

I write a lot of poems about visual art: paintings, collage, sculptures, and photography. Images show up in my poems more often than not. “Darkroom” is the result of my discovery of the photographer Sally Mann, who takes the most disturbing and amazing black and white photographs. I watched a documentary about her called “What Remains”; seeing her work in her darkroom made me think about how poets work in a darkroom, too – the spaces in our subconscious minds, dreams, impressions, and bits of conversations that all end up in our poems. The New York Times called Mann “a poet of the human body,” and I like that description of her view on things like childhood, landscapes, and mortality. She is obsessed with the same things I am: death, decay, rebirth – the inner workings of Nature that go on all around us. Most people don’t pay attention to these things, but Mann does in her photographs, in a way that catches the viewer completely off guard. When I see her images, I immediately recognize them as the mysterious and ever-present processes of the Earth.

 

 

The chickens and gardens came out of my lifelong desire to do things myself. I am the original DIY person. Lots of my projects fail miserably, but that doesn’t stop me from trying them. I have written about my “girls,” but not in poetry – yet. One of my hens was featured in a Mother Earth News article about keeping a small flock. It took the photographer hours to get her to pose eating a worm!

 

The place where I live works its way into many of my poems, and is often the subject of them. Poems like “Fire Season” and “The Redwoods” are about the ambivalence I sometimes feel about Nature and its various personalities. I can remember times when huge trees were falling all around the house, barely missing us, and the summers when the scent of smoke hung in the air for months. However, it’s mostly calm and beautiful here in the redwoods, and a very interesting place to be a writer. There is always something going on in the forest; it’s a busy place, full of insects, birds, rodents, and mammals. I consider this property an outdoor laboratory, and I learn things here all the time. This is my cure for writer’s block: I step outside and just listen. Soon I hear the subtle sounds of redwood needles falling or the flap of a bird’s wing. Sometimes all I hear is the distant hum of the freeway, but it never fails to get me writing again.

 

 

 

 

they will come back to me

when they have tired of

their ordinary lives

 

when desire emerges from a fallow season

they will turn west

where the wolf is new

 

and lightning hits the mountains

over and over

until God has no more face

 

flower of a disturbed landscape

with thin blue arms

and bracts like cracks in old china

 

my seed will catch a hem

work itself into a seam

 

and walk all the way

to the Pacific

 

 

 

 

 

this year pain

keeps me stripped

under the primitive trees

 

in dreams I gather

white ghost lights

 

girls in ruffled nightgowns

emerge from the forest

offering alms

 

scent of orphans

and old sachets

 

first the tingle

then the long

slow

numbing

 

 

 

 

 

The sun

an ocular concussion

illuminated every gap and hollow

 

the places where

my children used to hide

hands over their ears

 

I would never be

their father again

childhood was beyond me

 

the house, hot and damaged

as if in a fire

emptied of second-hand furniture

 

waited on its concrete pad

for a new family

 

nothing lasts

not even the sun

with its white unbearable face

 

 

 

 

 

In the spirit world

backlit by old stars

 

dreams sound like

water falling

 

we are inside

and outside

at the same time

 

trays clack like old bones

as faces rise from wet paper

 

their deep cloudy eyes

and conquered mouths

appear between our hands

 

lips and chins a blurry landscape

touched with the faint light

of a slow exposure

 

switch off the red

and exhale

we stand on their ashes