“Honey-Sweet We Sing for You”: A Poetic Collaboration (My Guest Post at The Poetry Department)

Please check out my guest post at J.I. Kleinberg’s blog, The Poetry Department, about my collaboration with Seattle composer Aaron Grad on our cantata reinterpreting the Sirens myth for the Early Music Seattle program “For All Our Sisters”! Click here:  “Honey-Sweet We Sing for You”: A Poetic Collaboration.

UPDATE 7/24: The videos I made about the cantata are now live on the Early Music Seattle “For All Our Sisters” Performances page. Click on my photo to view the hour-long interview with Claudia Castro-Luna and me, and click on the Sirens painting below it to view the three-minute video of me describing my approach to the Sirens myth in writing the libretto.

Thanks, too, to Early Music Seattle for featuring me in their weekly Clef Notes series. Scroll halfway down to “This Week’s Selections” to see their very kind words about my poetry and a gathering of links to my work available online.

Gratitude for Good Things in Spring 2020

I have many thanks to pass along to journal editors, amid the pandemic and heavy griefs of this spring, for bright spots of cheer and good publication news. Back in March, Terrain.org published my poem “the summer the sun hid” as part of its Letters to America series. Cherry Tree included my poem “Narcissus in Love,” about you-know-who enamored of his own reflection, in its annual issue. EcoTheo Review published my poem “Mother Earth’s Easter Address” in both its print and online issues.

And I found a wonderful home in the journal Cave Wall for “Landscape with Unsettled Figures,” the concluding poem in one of my full-length manuscripts. I’ve been submitting poems to Cave Wall for over eleven years; it’s one of my “dream” journals, featuring superb poems and beautiful wood-block prints. Not only did editor Rhett Iseman Trull select it to publish in this spring’s issue; she also, astonishingly, nominated it for a Pushcart Prize and a Best New Poets award. Much gratitude to all these editors for supporting my poetry in these ways.

[UPDATE: “Landscape with Unsettled Figures” has also been picked up for Verse Daily! Click on “Archives” to find my poem posted on June 15, 2020. My sincere thanks to editor J.P. Dancing Bear for choosing it!]

I wish safety and good health to you and all your loved ones. If you can, will you join me in making donations to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter Global Network, or community bail fund of your choice to support the fight for human rights in America?