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.

Happy to receive my contributor’s copies of the Summer 2024 edition of The Midwest Quarterly, edited by Lori Martin. It happens that my poem, “La Música Del Fin Del Mundo,” follows directly after my friend’s, poet & drummer Kevin Rabas, poem about Charlie Parker. Also in the magazine is a poem by a fellow BGSU MFA program student, Phillip Sterling, whom I haven’t seen since sometime in the last century. The handsome sky blue cover photo with legs a-dangle from a carnival ride seals the deal.

I received my contributor’s copy of the Winter 2024 issue of Main Street Rag. Main Street Rag press is the same operation that produced my last book, Breaking Down Familiar. It’s a well put-together magazine with a variety of stories and poems, commentary, and a feature interview with Anne M. Kaylor. As usual, the lively presence of the editor, M. Scott Douglass, is sprinkled throughout with his photographs, motorcycle travelogue, and political commentary. The poems he selects are tight; I enjoyed seeing ones by people I know such as John Nizalowski and Jason Ryberg. The two of mine included are, “Full of Wind,” a political pantoum and “The Mangas Coloradas Skull Installation,” an imaginary installation artist’s statement.

In 1979 the Wisconsin Review published two of my poems. Last year, they again published a poem. And now in 2024, 45 years later, the Oshkosh-based journal accepted two poems, “Breaking News” and “Treelike.” Both are fanciful prose poems with a political tinge. Thanks to Senior Editor Jordan Brown and his staff.

The Midwest Quarterly poetry editor Lori Martin has accepted “La Música del Fin del Mundo” for the Pittsburgh State (Kansas) based publication. The title is in Spanish because the narrative takes place in Chilean Patagonia, and “the end of the world” literally means a settlement at the southern tip of the continent. While traveling in that part of the world, my wife and I kept seeing highway signs telling us how far it was to the end of the world. The milieu of the poem concerns the figurative meaning of the phrase. This will be the third poem Ms. Martin has published in the esteemed journal.

Today I received my contributor’s copy of the September 2023 I-70 Review. This Kansas City based journal, edited by Greg Field, Gary Lechliter, and my friend Maryfrances Wagner, is a handsome thick tome with a plum cover featuring Dixie Salazar’s mixed media extrapolation on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Inside is a wide selection of poems including those from many folks I know, such as Walter Bargen, Mary Gilliland, Ken Hada, Ted Kooser, Denise Low, Al Ortolani, and Tyler Sheldon. I’m honored to have therein a partly true poem about my birth in a hospital overlooking the Kansas City train yards and my father’s paper route and wild marijuana growing on the banks of the Kansas River, and of course I had to work in Charlie Parker busting the charts on “Salt Peanuts” and “Hot House.”

It’s gratifying when a literary editor “gets” your work. Brian Daldorf of Coal City Review has accepted four previous poems for as many different issues, and now has selected “Circulars” for the next issue of his Lawrence, Kansas-based publication. Although I’ve got long-standing connections with Lawrence, I’ve never met Brian, though I’d like to. I like that Brian is “old school,” in that he continues to carry on his lit bidiz by US postal mail, eschewing the electronic Submittable mode that most other editors use. The “Circulars” in the poem were one page butcher shop sales flyers that I used to deliver when I was a boy in Oceanside, New York.

My book with Main Street Rag Press was awarded the 2023 National Federation of Press Women’s 2nd Place in the Creative Verse Book Award. The book was forwarded to the national contest after having won 1st place in the New Mexico Press Women’s contest. Needless to say, one needn’t be a professional journalist or a woman to enlist in the Press Women organization to become eligible to submit to the contest which has 60-some categories of judging.