I have a 29-year-relationship with AWP. In three decades I've probably attended ten or twelve meetings in various regions of the country. Several meetings I've forgotten but I know for sure there was one in Savannah, two in Atlanta, one... Continue reading

At the Robinson Jeffers Conference the keynote started her talk by saying she'd never heard of Robinson Jeffers until she got the invitation to speak. I told them I'd been reading Jeffers since I was a sophomore in college, about... Continue reading

Last week I took a side-step or maybe even a step back in my technological rumba with the literary future. I bought a desktop computer again, a brand new 20" iMac, and when it arrives I'm installing it in what... Continue reading

A friend wrote the other day to say that for her a particular place exists mostly in her head. I thought about this and realized that place for me often begins with where I am physically and my relationship to... Continue reading

I want to buy a mountain place. I’m looking for the purest form of retreat. I want to put as many one lane bridges between me and the nearest Wal-Mart as possible. But I also know it’s the Southern mountains,... Continue reading

Mike comes into my tiny office and holds up a new anthology of contemporary poetry. "We'll never be in a book like this," he says with a resolved sadness. We are both in our 30s and have published two chapbooks... Continue reading

In Charlottesville I stumbled into a short career as a chef. I was a Hoyns Fellow, a poet, a young intellectual in love with the world inside my head, a world of words, ideas and things. Though I had good... Continue reading

Outside beside the door at Copper Canyon press there was a pile of Douglas fir chord wood for the stove. Before I came in to work in the mornings I'd split the wood into smaller pieces, striking at the wood's... Continue reading

Three weeks ago I was in New York City to visit family and do a couple of “salon” poetry readings, one uptown at a friend’s apartment to a group of thirty or so of her literary friends, the other a... Continue reading

Has anyone done research on the differences between poets (or anyone else) who get up early and those who stay up late? A friend of mine once gave me advice that’s worked for me: “Let not one day tread upon... Continue reading

When I was a young poet I used to work at poems sequentially and with great patience. I would write in the morning soon after waking. I don’t remember how the poems came to me. What I remember is working... Continue reading

In January I traveled to China for a little over two weeks. I stayed mostly in Shanghai, studying “Tradition & Modernity” with 18 of my Wofford College colleagues. Our lodging was comfortable, a modern hotel on the edge of Fudan... Continue reading

Chuck the Biologist had placed fifteen aluminum Sherman traps all over the old Glendale cotton mill site, Wofford College's outdoor classroom, a post-industrial landscape of granite rubble, twisted rebar, scorched bricks, and rusted bolts. There are two standing mill towers... Continue reading

Today at the South Carolina Book Festival I decided to descend the antiquarian alley where poetry books live extended lives alongside their more popular cousins in prose. As I walked under the antiquarian banner I thought about the fate of... Continue reading

This is my first post for my week as BAP guest blogger and it will be short. Tonight for dinner I ate something called a Liberty Tavern Club. It had an egg on it. It didn’t go very well with... Continue reading