About
I suppose I really started to love writing when I was teaching English, mostly to ninth graders who couldn’t understand why they had to take a course in the language they spoke. For the most part, at least initially, I wrote to complete the assignments I had given my students. I wanted to make sure my instructions were clear and easy to follow. But then, my writing took on a life of its own and eventually led to this: publishing my works and building my own website to give them a home.
I hope you find something here to your liking. Thank you for spending some of your valuable time with me. I hope you’ll decide to return.
About Posts
I wrote everything that appears here, except as noted. The works are mostly poetry, but there is some prose. Some of my writing is serious, some just nonsense. Some of it is happy, some sad. The images are also mine: drawings, paintings, various sorts of mixed media, collages, and photographs. I tried to choose images that have something in common with whatever is written there, but sometimes I just had to go with the best fit, even if it appears to be a haphazard pairing.
About Collections
These are groups of works that have something in common. So far it just contains one collection, that of a series of poems I wrote with a group of children during a summer school session I taught in 1996. I would ask each child to suggest a line or just a few words. We edited as we went along. I hope you’ll agree with me that they did a wonderful job. At the end of the session, each of the children received a booklet containing all the poems we had written together.
About Glossary
This section contains definitions of many literary terms, especially those I often use when writing. I have also included definitions of specific forms of poetry and poetic devices and, in some cases, examples to clarify the meaning. Some of the definitions and descriptions will guide you if you decide that you want to write your own poetry. It does not include every possible literary term, but it should help you understand some of the things poets think about as they write.