I have students who have pet bobcats, who love celery, who adore brushing their teeth, who like to get in car wrecks. I have students who won’t eat hot dogs, and students who will eat crickets. I have students who have two colored eyes, and students who own two goats – one that faints, and […]

Am I ready?

I just drove into town as four log trucks rolled out.

I have my slide rule, gold pan, blank canvas, International Pathfinder 8000 8-Band Radio, and my baseball bat. I’m as ready as I get.

Read in the New York Times Book Review yesterday that Nicholson Baker just wrote a (nearly 800 […]

I appreciate first day of class speeches. It’s a genre of its own. I am beginning my tenth year as a high school teacher this Monday. Some of my classes will hear a version of this:

On Poems and Pull-Ups

I am a poet not a United States Marine. I believe that the body and […]

The topics stack up. I appreciate books and conversations and sermons and relatives and all kinds of small things that have crossed my sensory pathways. Trying to photograph squirrels to send to my sister, and also having the Silly Putty stuck at the bottom of my daughter’s hair and not the top.

Sentence fragments. […]