Hello friends,

By chance, by grace, and last minute, we were allowed to stay up at Camp Casey on Whidbey for the Thanksgiving holiday. We brought some friends and even some family for the celebration (subdued though it sometimes was by all of us trading around an illness day-by-day 🤧). But it was nice to share with them finally this place where our little family has such deep ties. The whole thing made me feel grateful for everything, even the storms we're weathering just now, which is I suppose what Thanksgiving is for.

Publications

Well, it's broken.

Remember when I fell on the stairs and thought I cracked a rib and while checking it out, they found my bursting appendix? Well I also hurt my hand then, preventing the full fall, and since August, it hasn't stopped bothering me. I can't do a push-up, can barely hold the steering wheel. So, back to the Dr. I go only to find that I shattered something called a "hamate."

Bodies, amiright?

Speaking of, I have a new poem, Transport, up at Ekstasis Magazine that you should check out. I had read a poem by Robert Hedin called "Transcanadian" and thought I'd try something along those tracks. I do this sometimes. Viewing poetic work as a grand conversation across time, I've been trying to respond to others more, rather than always bringing up new topics. Maybe I'll make a whole collection of these and call it After All (Robert Lowell has a series of "After" poems I'm calling back to.) The other title I'm kicking around for poem book #3 is a bit of a mouthful--how would it look on a book spine 😝--but I kind of love it:

Dear friends,

It's about to get wild over at ours as my school's beginning tries to time with my kids'. Before the year begins in earnest, then, here are a few updates.

I'm pretty sure this isn't how it works, but the only person I know who's had an appendectomy (and just this year) came over to my house for brunch last month. By evening, I was in the ER 🚑 with a pain in my side. It must be going around. The docs said I had probably 48 hours before it exploded. So, on top of everything else, I had abdominal surgery and am now recovered, more or less, to my former...glory(?).

Happy Summer, friends!

We're adrift amidst a sea of changes around here: the new baby, a new leadership structure at the university, a new direction for our church, and a new house (needed; have a spare?) are all vying with the usual ups and downs of parenting, and of the artist's life, for the coveted Most Destabilizing cup 🏆. Thankfully, there lives the dearest freshness; thankfully, joy comes in the morning, thankfully, poetry.

Also, the Glen is coming to Seattle! If you don't know it, the Glen Workshop is a multi-disciplinary, multi-day arts retreat that acts as the center of the people-of-faith/people-of-arts nexus. It's continuing education for MFA'ers (or MFA hopefuls), it's a toe-in-the-water trying new things, it's worship and workshop; it's seeing old friends. And this year, it's a few blocks from my house. (Missed it this time? See you at the next!)

She's here!

Cicely Rose was born on April 10th, and she is healthy and happy and sweet as a peach. What a wonder! What a waiting! And how very worth it. I am confident to report after our three days' acquaintance, that she's consistently delightful, keen on eating, and is into music and her older siblings already. From her stint in utero I'd have said she's headed for a life in dance, but out here, she's been more reserved, soporific so far.

Thanks be to God.

Chers amies et amis,

We have come through the worst of winter, which was, as ever in the Pacific Northwest, relatively tame. We've had our second to last fire of the year. The light is returning, the cherries considering an explosion, and the first brave daffodil bunch around here lifted its yellow head just now.

I used to watch a TV show as a kid called Beyond 2000, which imagined what the world would be like in the new millennium. We were, to put it mildly, both colossally wrong and wildly optimistic in our predictions. Just saying "2023" sounds insane to me. It isn't that I never thought I'd live this long, that I'd make it to see this year, just that I never projected myself this far forward into time, never bothered imagining it. 2023! Who ever heard of such a thing?

As some of you know, I'm trying to be better at marking time, so here's some things I want to keep ahold of from this year we've just finished. Many thanks to readers and friends near and far. Happy new year!

• To start things off, this was the year my edition of Festus, a labor of some years, was published by Edinburgh, as well as this essay explaining why I bothered.

• I made these poems! I mean, I made other ones too, but these ones were published. Just to be clear.

• This is the year--the first! and may it be the last 🤞--when we took the kids to Disneyland, where we all got COVID and had to stay inside for the rest of the trip 😷.

• Later in summer, my favorite spiritual writer, Fred Buechner, died and I wrote this little recollection. RIP

• Then, Dean Young, a poet who taught me as much as anyone else ever had, also died. Geez.

• At SPU MFA we had Chigozie Obioma, Christopher Merrill, and Mark Burrows as guests.

• The tour schedule was a bit lighter this year, but I did make it down (and by “make it down,” I mean “took the 🚂”) to LA to see David Wittig's gallery show and to give a paper on Scottish travel writing in the c19 at CCL Biola with Karen Swallow Prior and the poet Paul Willis.

• Speaking of poetry, the books I was happiest to see this year were: Karen An-Hwei Lee Rose is a Verb, Nance Van Winkel Many Beds of Martha Washington, Alexis Sears Out of Order, Paul Willis Somewhere to Follow, and David Lyle Jeffrey Testament of Witness.

• In between other things, this year I gave this interview, this podcast, this artist webinar, and these radio appearances.

• Oh man, and this was also the year I first took students to England on CS Lewis business! An unbelievably rich time (I’m especially grateful to the now retired Kim Gilnett for assisting). Pictures here.

• Speaking of gratitude, this year Tom Amorose and Mark Walhout retired from the English Department. Jennifer and I wrote them funny send-off poems.

• The best events I attended were the Malcom Guite/ Steve Bell show at SPU and the epic Over The Rhine show at St. Mark’s Cathedral.

• Right, and I hosted an interview...or Image Journal hosted and I..er..asked the questions of JHH about music criticism. Singer John Van Deusen zoomed in and joined the chat.

• Partway through this year, I developed plantar fasciitis and could hardly walk. Every morning, I sorted through an awkward collection of insoles to find one that I thought would get me as far as the office.

• Sebastian started kindergarten. 👩‍🏫

• Our precious Lucca Maria was baptized.

• I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.

• The most memorable reading experiences of the year were Anne Avery’s Reynard the Fox, which I loved entirely, and Klosterman’s The 90’s, which was probably the most resonant (in that I recognized, remembered, every single cultural artifact or anecdote he shares therein, but from living it.)

• I watched two movies this year and they were both great: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021), a kind of stop-motion mockumentary about a snail that somehow made me cry, and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which finally made sense of the esteem in which my fellows seem to hold the lead actor, Marlon Brando.

• We got Apple Arcade and my kids started playing Shovel Knight Dig, which brought me right back to our family's acquiring the original Nintendo when I was their age.

• Toward the end of the year, we had Thanksgiving at Whidbey!

• Then we went back to Whidbey at Christmas and it snowed!

• When I look back at this year, I’ll remember these records most. 🎧

• And then, of course and above all else, this was the year Amber began growing our new girl, whose premiere we expect in spring. 🤰

Alright friends,

It looks as if there’s time for one last missive before my annual Year-in-Review post. We’ve just returned from a paradisal Thanksgiving on Whidbey Island where I finally got the turkey absolutely perfect while my friend Hopkins mastered, and utterly, the apple pie. Those were two pretty big wins.

Meanwhile, I’m wrapping up grading for the fall term at SPU: my Faith and Literature class was great fun, as usual, and I’m gearing up to teach Shakespeare for the first time in a few years. Curiously, this is the most consistent subject I’ve taught over the course of my career, having offered it at Tübingen and UW as well. Stay tuned from updates from the pit.

Beloveds,

Alright you lovelies,

I write this on the morning of my departure for England with the study abroad group; I wanted to send an update beforehand because I imagine the hits will come quick once I'm there and I shouldn't like to beleaguer readers with some elephantine saga attempting to cover several continents.

So, we made it to Disneyland after all, but Peter's Pan's flight was closed, with Pirates of the Caribbean. It turned out also to be one of the hottest days of summer and one the busiest and the good planners in Anaheim have ripped out all the benches and shade trees to encourage people to buy concessions at indoor tables. "Dispiriting," is how I'd categorize the affair, except that the news Star Wars land is so magical and fun it nearly rescued things. Here's a puzzlement: did you know that Disney has a book imprint? And they make pretty nice hardback versions of Moana and whatever? And did you also know that on Main Street USA there's a shop marked "bookstore"? Guess what they sell in it. Mickey Mouse sweatshirts. Narry a book in sight. Odd, right?

We headed from there down to sunny AZ where we promptly got COVID. All of us, one after another. So after all that driving, I didn't see my parents, sisters, or friends. We just laid about convalescing with my generous in-laws and then went home.

Dear friends,

In a couple of days, my family will climb the proverbial staircase, look around in the blazing summer sun, inhale, and slide down the coast.

Longtime readers will remember that we took a similar trip two years back, but only those with deep and storied knowledge of my biography will know that I grew up taking the same one. When I was young, we lived in OR and sometimes WA and the only vacation our family ever took was scooting down I-5 to see my grandmother in sunny AZ. And now, here I am rehearsing the custom, driving my young down the same road, to the same house in fact, to see theirs.

Some of you have asked about the webinar I told you about. Yes! it was recorded and you can watch here!

Don't get too excited now.

This is not the fulsome missive you might have expected (might even have deserved)--that is coming, and soon.

This is merely the announcement that I'll be reading some poems and talking about creativity with my friends at CS Lewis Foundation online tomorrow.

My friends!

Well the gallery show in LA was a hit! In one of those strange twists my life sometimes takes, I found myself at a bottle-service-only rooftop bar in Beverly Hills, let in my two huge, besuited security men who must have been models by day (this is LA, after all) between actual velvet ropes to confrere with the headlining artist. And what a show! Dealing in nuclear issues, government secrecy, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, it also features a daring and striking aesthetic (those stark images are made from the most tonally-sensitive instrument available, and are technically photographs, but only just).

Then I gave my paper on Scottish travel literature to no little fanfare (well, kind of a little fanfare) at Biola, where I also chanced to meet the wonderful Paul Willis, who read to us from his new volume, and Karen Swallow Prior, who somehow made all of us literary types fall more in love with books.

Dear ones,

In a way, it's nice to have a bookend, a talisman, a fin at the end of a film. The first thing the pandemic cancelled for me was the launch party for The Elegy Beta which was scheduled for March 10th, the day the governor closed our state. And now--Lord-willing, and barring an unforeseen resurgence--the last thing it cancelled was the Spring MFA Retreat. I was looking so forward to seeing these writers, to being at Camp Casey, but there's comfort in knowing, or at least in feeling, that this is the last swipe of the claw.

Okay though, here's the big stuff:

Dear friends,

Well, I got COVID the first week of 2022.

Inauspicious beginnings, you might say, but I'm glad to be done with it (and glad I didn't have to cancel class because of it. The timing was considerate, all things considered). Classes are going well apart from that and I've got some exciting publications coming up; as ever, more are in the works.

Also, it's my birthday tomorrow 🎉 My kids and I baked a cake together in celebration and it's sitting even now in our fridge awaiting the feast. Here, have a piece: 🍰

Oh my dears!

The world so changed! Fewer things of note happened this year that might have: I threw fewer parties, attended fewer conferences, gave no public readings, but for all that lack, it was still an eventful one, full of growth, mostly on behalf of the wee Willetts, and of grace. I met inspiring students, welcomed new colleagues, and said goodbye to old ones. Here are some bits I'd like not to mislay.

⚾ This year, I took the children to their first baseball game

• and to their first concert (TobyMac at Evergreen State Fair).

Dear ones,

First, this is a place on the earth and I live here. I just wanted to point that out.

Wait a second, can it really have been that long? We haven't had a missive since Spring? Goodness. I've missed you all.

I want to go back and tell you the things: so much happened--to tell you Mrs. Willett and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary and people read poems and raised toasts under the globe lights strung from the cherry tree. How beautiful it all was--but the only way is forward, I think, and if I start in about the kids' new bikes, and Sebastian's first soccer camp and the trip to Baker Lake, and my first in-person MFA residency we really won't ever get caught up, so how's this? I'll just say "Summer was pretty nice" and you just fill in the details as you will.

People!

I’ve been blessed to have articulate blurbs for my books from people I admire, James K.A. Smith, Scott Cairns, Malcom Guite, to name only the most well-known, and so I try to pay it forward, writing accurate, compelling blurbs of books I believe in when asked. Lots of times, I can’t do it because I don’t actually love the book in question. I try to be honest about this and never seem to get behind a book I can’t, you know, get behind. Last week alone I turned down two publishers who wanted blurbs for forthcoming books that I just couldn’t put my name to. Hopefully, if I stay principled about this, it will mean someday I have a list of books I really believe in. Recently, I’ve blurbed three: Jeremiah Webster After so Many Fires, Laura Reece Hogan Litany of Flights, and Ben Palpant The Stranger. Of the most recent, here’s what I wrote.

Ben Palpant’s poems in The Stranger breakdance through both biblical and literary history, remixing tunes from Tennyson and Gwendolyn Brooks with samples from the pop band Starship and the Divine Office. But those juxtapositions are not this strong collection’s best surprise. Rather, it’s the big quiet after each poem ends in which we mouth both How true and Hallelujah. This book is at once a daring and a tender undertaking.

If I feel close to this animal, it’s because I helped dig up its bones. They weren’t ready yet, having only cured in the soil for eight or so months and still had bits of fat attached to them, more work for the enzymes to do. When done, my colleague Peter Wayne Moe and I hauled them up to the rooftop of a nearby academic building to bleach in the sun.

I hefted the enormous jaw up to him via aluminum ladder and smiled, over the next year, to think of the students going in and out of that building, oblivious to the fact that they read or performed experiments, or whatever they did in class, mere feet below a whale carcass.

Eventually, with a group of students, he built the thing into a full skeleton and hung it in the atrium.

Well, well, well.

How the time gets away, no?

Here’s what’s happened since last we communed:

I attended my first residency as a poetry mentor in SPU’s marvelous MFA program in creative writing. We had to conduct the whole thing over zoom, but it was still so very fruitful, the students eager and energized. I profited especially from Lauren Winner’s seminar about Julian of Norwich, about whom I knew nothing, and from the poet Tim Siebles‘ readings and craft talks. I’m looking eagerly forward to our August in-person gathering.

Hello dear ones,

I've missed you these last weeks, and have much to share, as usual, but rather than launch spectacularly into the cultural and writerly happenings you are used to finding in these missives, I thought just to share some books I've read and read and read recently that you may enjoy, especially if you, or someone you know, is 3-7 years old.

A	B

Being a father now of two little ones who fall asleep with books surrounding them more often than stuffed animals, I have had—suddenly it still seems to me—a new genre with which to contend, in addition to the poetry, essays, historical fiction, and theology books I’m usually reading: kids’ picture books. I’m still waiting for the day that they can sit through Collodi’s Pinocchio, or The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island and the rest (though we have recently made a very rewarding go of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is seriously amazing), but for years now, I’ve had to content myself with reading and re-reading picture books with only a sentence or two per page, lest the littles grow restless.

My Dears,

How is there always so much happening? Every time I sit down to pen you a missive, I think O, I’ll just jot a short note and then am interrupted with the thought But you must tell them about that and O and that too. I suppose it is the work of a newsletter to, you know, cast the news, but yeesh. One likes a dusting of snow, rather than a dumping.

In any case, here’s the haps in the weeks since we last spoke:

NB- some of you will have seen this update already. I tried a different email distributor and it was a disaster. Here then is the email you should have received last week, with thanks for your indulgence…

Well, this year just keeps getting weirder doesn’t it?

I am underwater on a number of (mostly self-imposed) deadlines, but I wanted to surface briefly to share some bits, lest they accumulate and read like some catalogue in future.

Well well well.

Autumn is creeping down from the tops of the trees which gold there first and it has almost fallen, before rains come and fell all the leaves that carried it, upon our dreaming heads. It’s lovely, that is to say, as always. I’ll keep this relatively brief because there are some important details that I shouldn’t want you to lose in the heady reverie of our usual companionable soiree.

First, Amazon is somehow selling hardback copies of The Elegy Beta for less than $5.00(with free shipping!) right now. They may not be tomorrow, but as I type this, the offer is legit. I know, because I bought one. I truly don’t know how they afford to do this, since neither I nor the publisher agreed to such a promotion. Maybe it is an error on their part. But if I were you, if I was even the least bit curious about poem books, I’d get a copy while they’re hot. If you don’t dig it, bring it along as a hostess’ gift to the next dinner party you get invited to, assuming the world corrects and we have those again. Seriously, how in the world is this worth it for them? Do any of you know?

Hello Dear Ones,

I have been coming back, if not to normalcy–it’s too soon for a word like that–at least to some familiar rhythms these last weeks. I’ve been camping at Baker Lake, where I’ve been going since I was a 7 years old, and grilling on the back patio. We went up to Whidbey Island for the week and I sat on a chair reading William Meredith poems while my children mastered bikes (two weeks ago, neither could manage; now, they’re both daredevils). I’ve been planning my classes, obv, and I participated in my first (online) MFA retreat whereat Peter Hawkins (Yale) spoke movingly about Dante, and Carolyn Forche, so earnest and helpful and wise, told us about poetic habits. What a crew these writers are!

Also, that third review I was telling you about last time appeared! It’s in a place called EcoTheo Review and you can read the whole thing here. There’s much to admire in this review and I’m grateful both to its editors and to its writer, who says things like

Hello Dear Ones,

I have been coming back, if not to normalcy--it's too soon for a word like that--at least to some familiar rhythms these last weeks. I've been camping at Baker Lake, where I've been going since I was a 7 years old, and grilling on the back patio. We went up to Whidbey Island for the week and I sat on a chair reading William Meredith poems while my children mastered bikes (two weeks ago, neither could manage; now, they're both daredevils). I've been planning my classes, obv, and I participated in my first (online) MFA retreat whereat Peter Hawkins (Yale) spoke movingly about Dante, and Carolyn Forche, so earnest and helpful and wise, told us about poetic habits. What a crew these writers are!

Also, that third review I was telling you about last time appeared! It's in a place called EcoTheo Review and you can read the whole thing here. There's much to admire in this review and I'm grateful both to its editors and to its writer, who says things like

Alright friends. Here’s what’s up:

First, my family took a road trip to Arizona. It was our first such outing of—if the sitcoms are to be believed—what will be many. We were nervous and cautious because of the everything, but thought in the end it would be better to carry our germs in our own vehicle, breathing them only on our own families than to strew them about the neighborhood (we live in a pretty tightly packed and close knit section of Seattle) as we had been doing. I took some pictures, and since we’re all friends here, you can view them at this link, imagining that we’re swilling martinis together while I fiddle with the focus on the slide projector.

Second, The Elegy Beta got its first two reviews! The first is more informative than anything, but does manage to say:

Okay Lovelies,

How are we doing?

This extrovert is crumpling up without the sunlight of daily interactions, though I am blessed to have a yard with which to change the scenery, and one in which I am sowing pumpkins and marigolds in defiance of the apocalypse. There is something perverse in our having in Seattle such a string of fine days: one golden glow upon another, the only rain a shower of cherry blossoms and green revivifying everything and here we are all just..not on boats or skimming through the bookstore stacks. sigh

Lovelies,

It will not surprise those of you who know me well that I will take the analog over the digital any day: real lectures over online, real letters over email, plays over movies. I even still listen to physical media, getting records from the store and hauling them out of their sleeves when I want to hear music. It’s old fashioned, just the way I like it.

But in this time of quarantines, when so much of our lives is mediated through screens, I’ve seen so many others lending shoulder to wheel to create connection where isolation has been the rule, that I thought my own preferences should not keep me from doing my small bit.

Also, I miss you all. I miss seeing you.

Dear ones,

This is an uncertain and difficult time to be sure, or perhaps it is only a more clearly uncertain and difficult time than we are wont to face, but as always, there is beauty and truth and goodness in the face of it. To whit: where some schools sent students home immediately, SPU heroically made a way for those who need it to stay, eat, and keep learning. I’ve seen more churches come to creative rescue, more neighbors singing from their balconies, more restaurants creatively adapting to the needs of their communities than I was quite prepared for. A Lenten fast cast suddenly and forcefully worldwide has become, that is, an occasion for a kind of miracle.

And amidst a great deal that is dim, a couple of lights:

The Elegy Beta got its first review today! The fine folks over at Tweetspeak Poetry have published a (mostly-informative) mini-review that calls reading the book:

It’s here! 🍾

After nearly ten years in process, The Elegy Beta hits bookstores Today! I started writing the elegies in September 2010 and now they’ll be in your lovely hands.

You can order online and have it shipped to your house by clicking here:

Amazon | Indiebound | Queen Anne Book Co.

Dear ones,

You can pre-order The Elegy Beta right now‼️

I can’t tell you how strange it feels to say that. This thing that has been puzzled over and prayed, batted around and fretted through for the most part, the best part, of a decade, shuttled over the ocean to Rome and back, ferried over the Puget Sound among the islands, and then sent winging to publishers in Virginia and NYC is now going to come walking onto the fields of praise as real as any other ordinary thing, shaking the sleep from its eyes. I just. It’s amazing. What a gift to get to do this work.

Dear ones,

I'm not sure this is completely finalized, but I can't keep the lid on this. We have a cover for The Elegy Beta!

As I think I mentioned in my last, I couldn't be more pleased. The image of the fighter jet was made by the artist David Wittig with whom I've been discussing these poems for the last ten years. His work is the perfect compliment to these poems not only because they give a sense of terror, beauty, weightlessness, and balance, striking the pose effortlessly that I strive and fall over myself for in this collection, but because in a sense, we made these together. I'd finish one and send it to him; he'd make a group of photographs in response to it, which would usually provide the interpretive angle I needed to approach the next one, and so on. Sometimes, he'd send me an image of a woman on a beach and I'd think aha! That's what the Sixth Elegy means!

2019

Obviously, every day is significant in its own way, but when I look back on 2019, here are some milestones, way-markers, cairns to memorialize the too-quickly passing time.

• We started meeting as St. Ambrose. Technically, we began initial meetings at the end of 2018 in our living rooms, but things really got going this year: we got into a building, began hosting communion services, won the arts grant, and performed our first baptisms. I can’t believe, when I look back at the amount of imaginative space (and sheer time) Ambrose has taken up in my mind, that it’s only been a year. It’s the best church that ever happened to me, and if no other significant things had occurred this year, I’d still mark 2019 as a winner if only for this.
• Lucca Halloweened as an orca and Amber as Audrey Hepburn.
• Visit to our friends’ vacation house on Whidbey Island.
• And Lucca started First grade! (Also known as The Year I Started Getting up at 6:30 every Morning to Make Lunches)
• The first time I taught the Imaginative Writing class at SPU.
• This was the year I flew to Texas, seeing Waco and Baylor for the first time, and catching up with my Uncle Ken.
• After two years of waiting, the city finally opened the new David Rogers Park near our house.
• The one where we got a glimpse of teenagerhood-to-come at Lucca’s beach birthday, when she sunbathed and gossiped with three girls from her class.
• This was when we saw my friend Preston Singletary’s show at Museum of Glass about the Raven Cycle.
• This was the year when the documentary about Amber’s killer whale ballet, Apex, was created, debuting at the Friday Harbour Film Festival.
• It was also the year of her first choreographed play: Hart Island, which was so devastating and powerful.
• For our anniversary, we took a trip to Chicago and saw Hamilton! For the kids, this event is know as “when Nana and Papa came to watch us.”
• I spoke well at the NASSR conference, badly at the Armstrong-Browning multi-site conference (I had a minor tech-induced panic attack)and as among friends at the SPU College of Arts and Sciences Retreat.
• Come to think of it, this was the year we planned the faculty retreat too.
• This was the year when we stayed on the farm and Lucca slept in the fox den.
• I saw Rose Blossom Punch in concert (which was crazy b/c they stoped making music 20 years ago) and met Scott Hunter from Poor Old Lu, my all-time fav
• The year I discovered the band Luxury.
• We saw my brother’s family in Port Townsend!
• My Dad’s 60th birthday party in AZ!
• Trip to Leavenworth and the snow.
• This year I published these essays: Indian School Road; Student Help; The Magic and some poems in Relief, in between bouts of working on Festus
• In 2019, I was at the Hugo House all the time: for my own poem reading with Scott Cairns and Jennifer Maier, for James K.A. Smith‘s with Garth Greenwell, for Marylin Nelson‘s winning the Levertov Award.
• When these were the best records providing my soundtrack to the above-named activities.
• The year I signed a contract on a new poem book w/ new publisher.

So that is what a year looks like from a certain angle (eminence?). I’m grateful as ever for all of you readers and friends and am looking so forward to the next one.

Lovelies,

Why is the new book called The Elegy Beta you ask? Well, that's a fine question. You always ask such astute and piercing questions.

The title refers to the eponymous long poem at the book's close: a piece that responds to Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino Elegies, considered by many to be the greatest European poem of the 20th century. My elegies attempt to make the same moves as Rilke--thinking about angels and their place in history--without quite being translations. In that way they are a "beta-version" as in a pre-release of a piece of software meant for early adopters, but they are also a beta to Rilke's alpha: the second in a series, "an after-ing," as the poet Robert Lowell termed the practice. In so doing, I am participating in a revival of impressionistic "translations" used recently with great success by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy in Love Poems to God (Riverhead, 2005), and Anne Carson in Antigonick (Bloodaxe, 2012). My book's overarching theme is to ask readers to think about suffering differently, the title poem arguing that it is a gift we should spend more wisely than we usually do.

The "and other poems" is there in the title to signal that the Elegies only take up about half of the book; the rest is shorter poems of the sort you know and love from Phases. :)

My second poem book is coming soon!

The fine folks at Mockingbird are publishing it. I couldn’t be more pleased.

Awhile ago on , someone asked a group of #writers what magazines or journals had been the most supportive of their writing efforts, and I didn’t have to think about it: Mockingbird has been right there from the beginning, publishing individual poems and essays of mine, putting on amazing , mentioning my previous book in their fun weekly roundup series.

Alright

To start things off, here is a preview of a documentary film about my wife’s ballet Apex. It’s showing now through September at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art as part of the Deep Dive exhibit. (watch it with the sound on, b/c the music and editing are ethereal and perfect). If you’re headed to Friday Harbor, WA this summer, stop by. We’re pretty thrilled with how it came out.

(If your email program isn’t translating this image, click here to watch the trailer)

So what have I to say for myself, while Mrs. W has been making works of transcendent beauty? Well, mostly I’ve been editing Festus, which I’ll be doing a lot of over the next year, and the poem is still for me a source of great joy and surprise. I stand with Tennyson who said he scarcely trusted himself to say how much he admired it “for fear of falling into ecstasy.” I turn in my draft in August 2020, so, it’ll be awhile before you get yours, but don’t worry; I’ll remind you when the time comes.

The people!

First, there are a lot of new subscribers here; would you all mind making them feel welcome?

Man, have some things been happening. I don’t know where to begin.

Well, the term ended at SPU, and with a bang; I hosted the Creative Writing students at my house (the first time I’d ever done such a thing) and they brought the most tasteful poems and bits of essays to share!

People,

Alas and alack! That SAT essay I was telling you about in my last newsletter is finished but the editors are still sitting on it. I’ll have to link to it in another missive. Special thanks to my Imaginative Writing class for helping me with the ending.

Meanwhile, you may console yourself with this one, a set of suggestions for integrating Humanities undergraduates in actual scholarly research that I’ve just published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Those editors hacked off the last section of the essay because I was running long (imagine!), so if you’d like to read the original ending, here it is: Director’s Cut!

That other essay I published at Mockingbird about a classroom exercise was generally well-received (thanks to those of you who took the time to drop a line of encouragement) but got one–just one–hater. Taylor Swift and Austin Kleon helped me through the ordeal, which I wrote about here.

Hello Lovelies,

It’s a fine Spring shaping up here in Seattle: tulips dropping their opulent heads, the cherries flowering and falling, the light stretching long across the afternoons and into evening. What a time.

Here are some updates:

I’m working on a new essay about the SAT test. It will likely come out in the next couple of weeks (I’ll send word when it hits). The editor has been extremely thorough <– which I like; too few are these days. But for right now, I can’t seem to stick the landing. I have two alternate endings, both of which I like but which don’t make any sense together. What to do? We’ve been going back and forth deciding what to keep and what to cut. In any case, I’m eager to share it with you all when I untie this Gordian knot.

Hi (especially new) friends! It happened! Who knows how long it will stay, but Spring has pounced on Seattle and we’re all dizzy from the blow. Let us steady ourselves with:

News

I’ve had two essays published in the last couple of weeks that are free to read. The first, over at Front Porch Republic is called Some Reservations: Thinking about Native American Spirituality and it responds to some claims the great art historian Matt Milliner made in an article in First Things. My essay is basically recalling some (very) early memories about my life in Phoenix and it started as an exercise in Rhetorical Analysis in a class I was teaching at SPU last Winter (if you were in that class, can you remind me?) Basically, I put Milliner’s piece up on the overhead and we read through it looking for claims explicit and otherwise. Some of them started to feel egregious, so I responded with this. After the essay came out, I was talking about it on Twitter with some friends, and this picture came up, taken at the Phoenix Indian School in 1906.

I think it nicely validates the view I was advocating in the essay. I like a few things about this photo:

Thank you