Song of a Reformed Headhunter

This article may well be my greatest claim to fame! That I knew Patricia Lockwood when we were participants of the online poetry forum Poetry Free-for-all in the early aughts. In fact, she was one of three judges to crown me winner of the forum's PFFA Apprentice contest (a la Trump) after several grueling rounds of poetry challenges. It was always an occasion when Patricia posted one of her own poems in the forum for comment. The voice in the poems was always mesmerizing, the writing startlingly original. She deserves every bit of her success since then. The Vulture article below describes the long years spent in the slush pile before she was picked up by major publications. It also recounts the devastating health problems and family tragedies that have plagued this writer. After reading the article, my admiration for her has grown even stronger. How wonderful it is, that in the face of everything that life throws at you, you can remain funny, filthy, and tender.

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks. Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann ar...

I first met Rachael Briggs on-line, over at the internet poetry workshop Poetry Free-for-all. I have been a workshop member for years, even before I moved to the States in 2003. When Rachael found us and started posting her poems for critique, I was drawn to her voice (witty, interrogative, unafraid) and her artful ways with poetic forms. Once PFFA opened its Collaboration Ark, she and I decided to enter Howard's ship and write a renga (Japanese linked form) together. At that time, having moved from upstate NY, she was living in Australia, and so was leading an expatriate life, as I was, and still am, in NYC. She loved the natural environment down under, and many exotic animals, birds and plants soon found their way into her poetry. We thought we could carry our antipodean seasonal references into the renga, and thus convey the enormous distance that was covered by our collaboration. The renga "Steep Tea" has become the title poem of my new book. We enjoyed writing ...

Wrote this for PFFA's Valentine Contest this year. Based on popular vote, the poem came in joint second with Rachael Briggs's "Romantic Comedies Give Me the Screaming Me-Mes." Love in the Third Year of This Affair that We Won’t Call Marriage Faces have passed into memory through long beholding. Separate accounts pay for joint conundrums. There will be no trade of reading materials before bed, except books on relief from the public library. Unspoken rule for eating out: the one that moves fast gets the inside seat. Shoe size is an open secret. Since the subject was handpicked, double digits must be corrected for bias. Questions have been domesticated but not yet neutered. Jealousy makes up a frolicsome threesome when it is not acting scopophiliac or agoraphobic. Nicknames have stuck like darts. Certain gestures have become shorthand for affection and disquiet. Enough time has flo...

Call for Submissions for “Try to Have Your Writing Make Sense - The Quintessential PFFA Anthology” The Poetry Free-for-all will publish an anthology of poems –  “Try to Have Your Writing Make Sense – The Quintessential PFFA Anthology”  - at the end of 2013. For those of you who are new, PFFA was founded in 1999 by Béla Selendy and remains one of the preeminent online poetry workshops. It is still intent on the improvement of the writer’s craft. The anthology’s aim is to present the quality and diversity of work that has been developed and critiqued at the site. Remember: We’re mean. We’re nasty. We’re merciless. We’re cruel. We’re vile. We’re heartless. We’re an evil clique conspiring to annihilate your self-esteem, so observe the following rules for submission or we’ll slash your soul to ribbons:  • Only poems that have been workshopped in the critical forums at the site will be considered for publication. Those forums are: C&C, High, and Merciless. • If you ...