Three New Poems in DOOR = JAR Magazine

Door = Jar magazine recently published their Winter 2021 issue and there you will find three new poems by yours truly. A snippet of one can be found in the image above. These are the first poems that I’ve written after earning my MFA from the University of New Orleans to find a home with a publisher. I take some comfort in the fact that my poetry might still find its way out into the world without the incredible support I received from my teachers and peers at UNO. I learned and grew so much during graduate school and remain forever in the debt of the good people in that program. And, as an added bonus, my friend and fellow UNO alum, Jacob Budenz, has some poetry in here, too. Go Jake!

You can purchase Door = Jar and read the poems here.

If you read these poems, I hope you find something there that rings true, that gives voice to some small feeling buried deep within your breast, trying desperately to be understood.

The Heart’s Rebellion Against Goodbye

For Carolyn Hembree’s Craft of Poetry course at the University of New Orleans, she required us to interview a poet and then try to get our interview published. In my case, I interviewed the Arkansas poet Greg Brownderville and we published our interview in the Arkansas Review.

You can find our conversation about Greg’s work, influences, poetry, and tamales in volume 50, number 3, Winter/December 2019. Enjoy!

Three New Poems

I’m pleased to announce that three of the poems from my thesis manuscript have just been published in the Mojave River Review. You can read them here. “Like Bison” was written years ago when I first met my wife’s paternal grandmother. The poem has always intrigued me, which led me to revise it while in graduate school at UNO. In many ways it was the poem that gave me the confidence to apply to MFA programs in the first place.

An earlier version of “Perpetual Care” won the Vassar Miller Poetry award in 2018. This poem is a good representative of many of my current interests in poetry and language: intertextuality, memory, relationships, multiple voices, and juxtaposition.

“Last Evening in Lepanto” was inspired by a story a classmate told me about Elvis visiting his hometown. It took me three years to arrive at this version of the poem. Quite often I wondered if I should cut it from my thesis, but, thankfully, my thesis director, Carolyn Hembree, kept making a comment or two on each draft that encouraged me to complete it. Now, I’m pretty happy with the final version.

At the Lagoon

You can read my new poem, “At the Lagoon,” in the latest issue of Gloom Cupboard. It took quite awhile for this poem to emerge into this iteration. I received lots of helpful feedback from two of my poet-professors, Carolyn Hembree and John Gery. It seems like every interaction I have with these two reconfirms my choice to attend UNO’s Creative Writing Workshop.

2018 Vassar Miller Poetry Award Winner

I found out late last month that Ava Leavell Haymon, the 2013-15 Poet Laureate of Louisiana, selected my submission, “Hound and Other Poems,” as this year’s winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Award. Needless to say, I was thrilled. This is quite an honor for me because I know how good the competition was. The poets in the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop are fabulous. Supportive, productively critical, kind, and as fun as they are talented, I can’t imagine associating with a better poetry community than I’ve found here in New Orleans. To have my batch of poems selected from amongst this cadre’s work, is, well, embarrassing. I’m a better poet today for having read their work and received so much of their feedback on my drafts. Thank you, CWW!

About my poems, Ms. Haymon wrote: “[He] has made for himself an arena of adversity by allowing so much diverse language to come crashing into the ring. It’s as if his ear for language does not have the filters in place that usually simplify the task of communicating. All topics are on the table, all our modes of discourse are included, all the specialized discourses we hear all day long–what an exhausting way to begin writing. To write that way is to play a long game. Ezra Pound played that game his whole life.”

Two of the poems in my submission, “Hound” and “Summer Troubles,” have not yet been picked up by a journal. I’ll update this site when they have. You can read “Do Not Take the Tennis Court Oath” in Helen.