Embrace Your Point of View

Claude Monet upended public opinion of what good art was well over a century ago. Monet had a different vision of the world. The world wasn’t just a real place to be captured by the artist’s brush. Monet’s courageous point of view saw the world as sacred, dynamic, connected, and full of light. To this […]

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Sketches for a Wasted Youth

  Introduction   It might be narcissistically indulgent to provide an introduction for my own work, but I ask the reader to bear with me. Usually, I don’t try to offer much commentary on my poetry. However, Sketches for a Wasted Youth represents a certain crossroads for me as a Christian of the mystical persuasion […]

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The Creative Call

The first language of poetry is silence. All art begins with the imposing vacuum of the blank canvas. All music must spring forth from inaudible melodies. Before the truth of nature or the Divine can be grasped, the creative mind must be inclined to the vacant spaces. For one to discover meaning in shafts of […]

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Proust in a Time of Coronavirus

I’ve started a new reading group for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for anyone interested in reading this great work while we all exercise social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the Proust in a Time of Coronavirus Facebook group, I have also opened up another wordpress page for those interested in […]

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Yeats’ Haunting Vision – The Second Coming

There are few poems in the English language as bone-chilling as WB Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. This year marks the century anniversary of a poem that captivated and terrified the modern world. One needn’t be familiar with Yeats’ Irish nationalism, Theosophical inclinations, or his occultism to gain entrance into his imagistic rendering of the collapse […]

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Lisel Mueller’s Radiant Vision of the World

I first read these words in the basement level of a Chicago bookstore close to twenty years ago and I knew Lisel Mueller was a woman to be trusted: In Passing How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness   and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to […]

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A Confession

I am not a learned man, as I sit in this empty room I admit the diplomas on my wall are certificates of debt – nothing more; perhaps if my learning did not come through an untamed curiosity and fits of wild distraction I could speak higher of my higher education.   My library is […]

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Somewhere in Between

It’s hard to live somewhere in between the gutter and the stars to sing rhapsodic songs in the tangled wreckage of yesterday’s swirling storms   Harder still to believe silence isn’t a threat but a holy invocation into an unspoken litany an invitation that melts memory of the mire and night’s indigo shine into a […]

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A Lullaby in the Storm

Don’t worry child, the flickers aren’t the horror film projection of your nightmares, or the fiery arrows of an intemperate god. The rumbles aren’t the drumbeat of giants warring in the sky, or boulders crashing down the mountain. The sheets of water that beat the window beside your bed aren’t a wind-blown flood, or a […]

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