balanced on the edge

Now  that we’re on spring break, ten beautiful days, I have some spare time to update this blog. Don’t imagine me living it up in Cancún, however. I’ll be at home, catching up on laundry and writing a paper. I never was one of those Daytona Beach types, anyway. When I was studying Spanish in [...]

My dreams have been highly charged with symbolic images lately, more than likely due to my reading of Man and His Symbols, by Jung et al. I’ve scribbled a few haphazard images down in my journal, but there’s been little free time to think about what the dreams might mean. Instead, I’ve been reading poetry, [...]

The professor of my contemporary poetry course has given us each a chance to present a book published within the last ten years. My presentation was over Slamming Open the Door, (Alice James Books, 2009) by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. We discussed the book mostly in terms of its overall effect as a project. The topic is [...]

via flickr.com
“Shanghai – Bund Sightseeing Tunnel”
This photo reminds me of Jo Hemmant’s first search for images to symbolize Ouroboros Review. She wanted a photo reminiscent of a snake eating its tail without being obvious, and she ended up finding a black and white picture of a tunnel near London–a circle that hinted at the [...]

For poetry lovers who dream of going to Italy (who doesn’t?), I suggest the chapbook Gorizia Notebook (Finishing Line Press, 2009), by Robert E. Wood. Most of the poems in the collection are brief, and although they don’t follow the strict form of an Italian sonnet, they read like finely-crafted “little songs,” the original meaning [...]

Many thanks to  poet Michelle McGrane, author of peony moon, for compiling an exhaustive list of poetry picks for 2009. Michelle posted nine days of readers’ top-three poetry collections of 2009. You can find my picks here.
Although the three books listed were top on my list the day I sent Michelle my selections, I could [...]

This past fall I took a graduate course covering Robert Frost, the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur, all American poets esteemed for their attention to poetic form. The professor gave us his in-depth analysis of the lives, the times, and the poems of these poets. Although my appreciation for [...]

via ouroborosreview.com
Jo Hemmant, Jill Crammond Wickham, and Carolee Sherwood have just released issue four of the fabulous ouroboros review. The featured poet is Cecilia Woloch, who recently launched her latest collection, Carpathia. Your weekend poetry reading is sure to be a delight, since ouroboros is only a click away!
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Saturday evening New South, the GSU literary journal, hosted a reading at the Highland Inn Ballroom in Atlanta. James May, editor-in-chief of New South, invited me to read, along with fiction writer Jody Brooks and poet Jessica Hand. Jessica is completing her MFA at Georgia State, and Jody is a lecturer at GSU in the [...]

Many thanks to Helen Losse and Phoebe Kate Foster, editors of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, for including two of my poems in their fall line-up of poetry. It’s gratifying to see the poems begin a life outside the confines of my computer’s files. If you have a chance, read the Southern Legitimacy [...]