My Poetry on the Web

The Beloit Poetry Journal (BPJ) has published many of my poems. They've also created a web-based archive of past issues. Here are some links to poems of mine that have appeared there. Most are in pdf format--be patient while they load.

Display #
#	Web Link	Hits
1	The Adolescence of Orpheus This poem was featured in "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror," edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (2002). It's a take on the life of Orpheus before he got married to Eurydice.	366
2	At the Home for Retired Piano Teachers A humorous look on that petty tyrant of childhood, the neighborhood piano teacher.	334
3	Beard on Vacation: Beach A playful poem about waking up next to one's beloved on a beach vacation (though in reality there was no beloved, beach, or vacation, only the beard--oh well).	328
4	Chaco Canyon Probing an ancient mystery: What happened at the thousand-year-old ruins of New Mexico's famous Chaco Canyon, causing a huge empire that lasted several centuries to collapse?	353
5	Driving through New Mexico In which the poet, surrounded by the beauties of the New Mexican desert, suffers a crisis of faith (to which poets seem all too often prone).	337
6	Entrance Inspired by the entryway of a house in western Connecticut where the late sculptor Paul Suttman lived with his wife. Paul had decorated it with plaster casts of his work, turning it into an installation-like work of art.	344
7	Epitaphs from "New Mexican Cemetery" These epitaphs are the imagined voices of people buried in a cemetery I visited in Taos, New Mexico, talking about how they lived and died.	358
8	From "Ambient Noise" A series of seven poems, excerpted from a longer series of fifteen, about how music weaves itself around our emotional and spiritual life.	322
9	The Garden Sibyl The widow of sculptor Paul Suttman turned the grounds of their western Connecticut home into a sculpture garden displaying his work. I was intrigued by a piece called "Still Life with Fruit," which looked very different from a distance.	324
10	Museum Pieces Inspired by a visit to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. The traveling exhibition described in the second part featured works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).	313
11	New Mexican Cemetery This is the other part of my "New Mexican Cemetery" sequence, in which a chorus of the dead speak to me, the poet, about what they have to teach us about language and life.	311
12	Remedies This poem, based on the whimsically dreamlike paintings of the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-63), won the BPJ's first Chad Walsh Award in 1993. It was reprinted in "A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal" (2000).	305