In spite of the alliterative post title, I choose to believe that Michael Hathaway’s Chiron Review is a reference to the Chiron, the wisest centaur in ancient Greek mythology, rather than the sports car. But Chiron is my champion, as on the heels of a poem’s acceptance last month, he just offered publication for three more: “Passages,” an ekphrastic poem inspired by a surreal painting by Gary Barten; “Provenance,” about a splendid cork art table; and “Rainbarrel,” which plumbs a good deal about variations in rain and how we store water.

A leading literary magazine of Great Britain, Stand has been publishing since 1953. My 10th poem to appear in this magazine since 2016 is in the just released 2025 issue. The poem concerns an imaginary bout between the poem’s speaker and a red kangaroo. In spite of the fact that humans kill about 1.5 million kangaroos a year, they do not seem to be an endangered species. If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t wager on Homo sapiens outlasting the king of the outback.

Two more poems were published in Main Street Rag, edited by M. Scott Douglass. This one arrived in the midst of a New Mexico August hot spell with a cool blue cover photo by Douglass of water birds on a wide spread of water under the moon. The two poems by me in this issue, “Changeover” and “Pandemic Masks” make four accepted from my book manuscript Man-Moth & The Gospel of Possibility. Whenever this book becomes a published reality, Main Street Rag will be prominently represented within its pages.

Michael Hathaway, editor of Chiron Review, has published three of my poems in three previous issues since 2001. I admire literary journal editors like Michael, living in small towns (in his case, St. John, Kansas, pretty much the geographical center of the state of Kansas, which is pretty much the middle-est state of the contiguous 48), who keep their publications rolling year after year while trendier literary endeavors with grants and university subsidies flash and wink out. Oh yes, and the poem Michael just accepted, “You Are A Great White Shark,” takes place about as far from the center of the continent as could be.

M. Scott Douglas, motorcyclist and publisher of Breaking Down Familiar, has once again accepted a poem of mine for his magazine, Main Street Rag. The poem, “First Flyover,” tells the mysterious story of the Nazca Lines, constructed in harsh Peruvian desert about the time of Christ. The mind-boggling aspect of it is that the designs are so large they could only be recognized for their distinctive—often animal—shapes from an elevation, of which there are none in the vicinity. So it was a pilot in 1939 who first took in Nazca Lines for what they were. The poem puzzles how these pre-Incan geoglyphers were able to create at such a scale designs they could not see. I look forward to seeing this poem in print.

Back in the day when the National Guard patrolled the campus and town as a result of students protesting US military actions Indochina, I attended a spring semester and summer session at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There I became acquainted with the writing program’s literary magazine, Cottonwood Review, sometimes just called Cottonwood. If memory serves, Denise Low was the first editor I knew there, and for many years Phil Wedge was editor. Forty-six years after Cottonwood published my first poem with them, poetry editor Stephen Johnson has accepted my sixteenth poem to be published by that journal in eight issues, “Man-Moth’s Forage of Choice.” And the National Guard is once more amassed in the nation’s streets against protesting citizens.

I was pleased to receive notification that my poem “Children of Abraham and Moses” won Honorable Mention in the annual Robinson Jeffers Prize for Poetry. Notification first came in the form of a phone call from Tor House patron saint Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, who had generously hosted Jane and me in 2017 when my poem was the prize winner. Congratulations to this year’s Prize Winner, Alison Turner, and to the other Honorable Mentions, Partridge Boswell and Ingrid Wendt. Alicia Ostriker was this year’s judge.

My friend Barbara Rockman read a draft of “The Fat Man Eyes Greenland” and suggested I send it to Terrain.org for inclusion in their Letters to America section. I did so, and in very short order Simmons Buntin accepted it and posted it. Thank you Barbara and Simmons!

Today I was notified that my book manuscript, A Fortune of Doors, was long-listed (one of ten) for the Regal House Terry J. Cox Award. To me there was some ambiguity in the way the notice was worded as to whether it still has a chance to win. In any case, the winner is supposed to be announced April 15, 2025. By that point I suppose the ambiguity will have been dispelled. That manuscript was submitted January 27; in the meantime I have revised it to change the sequence of the poems, edit a number of them, and have retitled it, Sugar Out of Dirt. In case you’re wondering about the new title, the manuscript includes the poem “Treelike,” in which the Green Man (who first appearance was in my first book, The Jack of Spring) is quoted, “Trees make sugar… out of / sunlight, water, and dirt. Doesn’t / that beat what most humans do?

Thanks to Argos at Teatro Paraguas for hosting a reading by Sawnie Morris and me on December 15th. Sawnie’s work plumbed dreams and myths in uncanny ways. I was fortunate to have my daughter, Sandy, in attendance, who pulled out her phone and videoed me reading four of the ten poems that I read and got them posted on youtube. A link to those videos is on the audio-video links page of this website.