Posts during July will be few and far between as I am spending the month in Paris and am frantically trying to get all of it into four short weeks; I know it sounds like a long vacation, but there are so many smaller great museums and restaurants, and...

In mid-March, I challenged all of you to suggest a conclusion to a short story, the plot line of which was posted: see “Help Wanted–Short Story Department” from March 14. BELOW is the full story as I have completed it.  After the stabbing, the time warp occurs.  Read carefully...

Loyal followers of my blogs have discovered a translation of a will signed in 1745 on Olde Cape Codd.  (If you missed it, please take a look  in the list of Blogs for “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way”).  The below poem was inspired by my image of...

A few years ago, I bought an old will in an antique store and recently battled through the handwriting and old English to translate it.  It was so interesting that it forced me to write a poem about it.  More about the poem later; for now, I set forth...

The New England Poetry Club has an open mic once a month.  After three readings by selected poets, the mic is thrown open for about 10 callers each of whom can present one poem.  If you are interested in listening in, or in having a chance to read, let...

We just went through a time change which reminded me that around the time of the last change (“fall back”) I got bogged down in a short story.  The story is called The Lost Hour and the premise is simple: the hour that you lose when you fall back...

Fires/March 2022 I piled the wood carefully over paper and kindling,cross-hatched and balanced, with proper space between logs,made sure the flue was open,gently touched the edge of my match at bottomwatched dark smoke and burning shards of newsprint flutter upwardthen catch of the wood and sudden flash of yellow...

We all know what the news tells us about Ukraine. I await an outpouring of poetry and prose about what is happening there. Focus on this was sharpened for me when someone in my office, born in Russia, came to me and apologized (as if she had invaded herself)....

Recently I was honored by election to the board of the New England Poetry Club, a century-old institution founded by the likes of Amy Lowell and Robert Frost which clearly lowered its standards markedly based on my elevation to directorship. The Club is full of people far more accomplished...

All imagination is not poetry, but all poetry is imagination. This may not strike you as startling news, but then again we are struck by things which are in our own path, and that includes the same path of thinking. Here is a definition of “imagination” that would not...

They came looking for us, unaware of Eric the Red deSoto and da Gama  Raleigh and Hudson Drake and de Leon Magellan and Verrazzano Champlain, Cabrillo, Cartier, Cabot and Coronado  clueless Columbus his statues now defaced with red paint, broken noses on the ground seeking those who trudged the...