POET | PLAYWRIGHT | TEACHING ARTIST
Health
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I’m Sorry, But I’m Not Ruined.
Every time I hear the phrase “ruined for life” about sexual abuse, I feel diminished. Do I speak up? Being seen as a “victim” sometimes results in losing one’s standing as a rational adult. Compassion can easily slide into pity. And pity is never a good thing. Holding up victims as examples of ruined lives…
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Poetics & The Good Life: A Manifesto
Poetry is a “made thing”. But it’s not just a pleasant rhyme, not a pretty little story with tidy conflicts and a reassuring resolution. Poetry demands a representation that somehow conveys living consciousness. It’s transcendent of its own artificialness. And it is necessarily awesome, in the sense that it is also tinged with fear; if…
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Miss Me
What I have to keep in mind is that I may not have yet written the chapter that the person I am here for needs to read. Might be my boys. Might be a student. Might be a stranger. But it is arrogant to censor myself out of feelings of inadequacy. (Still not sure I’ve…
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The Greatest Risk
If a mean, little god were to take me, as I am now, to any time period in my life and drop me there, I would experience shame in regard to my actions. It seems simple to me: if I were the product of those actions, if those actions created my essence, I would not…
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Because Running is Using the Heart
There is a man in Denmark who lives each day dying well. And, I hate myself for my first thought after listening to him: I need to move to a place where I can dig a pond, like he did; where I can fashion my life like his. I use the word fashion deliberately, for…
