I’ve fallen behind with updates! In addition to my essay “The Paradox of Self-Promotion”, I had a new poem published last week at Autumn Sky called “Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”. It’s a cento, a form entirely composed by lines from other poets’ work. It’s actually really enjoyable to write a cento, although it proposes its own sort of challenge.

“Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me
from whose unseen presence the leaves
firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes
abjure all wealth and treasure. In the tempestuous
petticoat, your funeral. And on the day,
in farewell on the terrace, I caught sight
of myself as shadows blur towards the heart of night.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want:
not even to choose any more, only to follow.
Never mind the gossip of the world,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Memory, committed to the page, had broke
deceived into believing in permanence
for soundlessly the never-believed-in neared.

(With lines from Diane Seuss, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Herrick, Wang Wei, Norman MacCaig, Wendy Cope, Frank O’Hara, Constantine Cavafy, Ho Xuan Huong, Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, Moira Egan & Rainer Maria Rilke – more or less in that order.)

Thanks to editor Christine Klocek-Lim for choosing my poem!