Michele Lesko, editor of IthacaLit, accepted the poem “Sorry” for an upcoming online issue. The poem concerns a chance encounter on a bus, and how we imagine scenarios with the strangers we meet.

The Society for the Muse of the Southwest (SOMOS) in Taos has kindly invited me to present a reading on Friday, September 23, 2016 at 7:00 PM to be followed the next day by a workshop at 10:00 AM. Both events will be in a new venue (to me anyway) on Civic Plaza Drive in Taos. The workshop will be on questions in poems, their various functions, and how they work or don’t work to engage the reader.  More information about the reading and the workshop are in the attached links.

I have had the good luck in the past to have poems published in journals that do not specialize in literary art, where the subject of the poems aligns with the interest of other fields. So I’ve a poem on leatherback turtles in Chelonian Conservation and Biology, one on surfing in The Surfer’s Journal, and now I’ve received a copy of Fungi magazine, with my poem, “The Kingdom of Ignorance,” which features a mushroom “larger than a blue whale” (armillaria bulbosa), reprinted from my Finishing Line Press chapbook bearing the same title.  I salute the open-mindedness of the editors of these journals, in Fungi’s case, Editor-in-Chief Britt Bunyard and a whole colony of contributing editors.

Persistence pays…Ginosko Review had turned down six batches of my poems (that’s 30 poems) before accepting the entire 7th batch of five poems for the Fall 2016 issue.

This is the 30th anniversary issue, with beautifully bold cover art by Gregory Amenoff.  The poem of mine included, “In a Bar Near the School for the Deaf,” had been workshopped in Tony Hoagland’s community poetry writing class in Santa Fe.

New York City-based Barrow Street accepted the poem, “Glacier,” for its next issue.  The glacier retreats uphill as summer people heat up the world.

Larry Goodell, this month’s guest-editor of the Halvard-Johnson Blog, included my previously unpublished poem, “No Compass,” among a host of distinguished poets, including Jim Fish, D. R. Wagner, Anne Lynn McNaughton, Georgia Santa Maria, Margaret Randall, Mitch Reyes, Jules Nyquist, and Rudolfo Anaya. My poem was written after hearing Bill Nevin’s account of a Trump rally he had attended.  You can link from here or on the links page of this web site.

Tireless poetry promoter Denise Low has resurrected the Academy of American Poets online Forum, which was taken down from the AAP website after being hacked, into her own blog. Denise was one of the guest poets/hosts for the Forum in 2008, and she has managed to re-post (with permissions) the archived material on her own blog. The topics included are: “poetics, Charles Olson, Kenneth Irby, William Stafford, Victor Contoski, Lyn Hejinian…, William J. (Billy Joe) Harris, language poetry (lang-po), poetry editors, nature poetry, poetry forums, exploration, individuality, Patricia Traxler.., Donald Levering (poem), deep image, poetry month as ghetto, increase in published books of poetry, Stephen Bunch (and poem), poetry community, Wes Jackson, Judith Roitman (and emoji poems), Joseph Harrington on hybridity and interzones, syllabic measure, and Harley Elliott, Harrington on “passive conversation.” This is some fascinating material that you can check out on the link here and on the links page of this web

Bill Nevins, host of the Krypton Blue restaurant reading series, has kindly invited me to be the featured poet reading on Tuesday, August 9th at 7:00.  People are invited to arrive before 7:00 to dine and sign-up for the open mic which follows the feature reading. Krypton Blue is at 6040 NE Brentwood Lane in Albuquerque.

Just as Summer Solstice burned its way through our calendars, Jessica Isaacs and Rayshell Clapper, editors of Dragon Poet Review, posted the Summer 2016 issue, which includes a poem of mine, a lament really, regarding the devastating fracking which has made Oklahoma the earthquake capital of the nation. The scale of these operations is staggering–whole trains of hopper cars haul sand from north central states to Oklahoma  to pump in a lethal slurry into the earth to force petroleum products out of rock.  Find the poem here (go to page 49) or on the Links page of this web site.