Category: Poetry

Through tufts of grass, creeping jenny flickers and still the stones wait. Fog and dew web the meadow, the small cairn in the center. Ragged path rings the circle, fixed and frozen.

The mental worlds I create are inclusive in the sense that the reader is free to participate in the imaginings – I leave enough gaps in the poems for participation, and it is in the reader’s creative participation that beauty (real enough to be true) is born.

When I lived in Manhattan, I found West 10th Street beautiful. Now, in rural Tennessee, I get as much pleasure from the belted Galloway cattle. Much of beauty seems to depend on what you get to see, on what is around you.

Beauty is, perhaps, the supreme liminal space: the point of contact between who we used to be and who we could become; between profane and sacred, temporal and eternal, human and divine. Of the myriad ways to live out this calling, I have come to understand my own path as an aesthetic of joy, where is joy understood as something deeper and broader than mere pleasure, independent of temporary fulfillments.

My poem “Leaves of Words” is a homage to urban beauty, to the unexpected and spectral, the extravagance of the everyday. It’s also a nod to the president of our Brooklyn poetry past, Walt Whitman…