Poems

Selected Poems on the web

Radio

Check out my featured slot on KUOW Presents which aired this summer! KUOW Presents connects listeners to a diversity of stories and perspectives from around the Pacific Northwest and around the world on topics that matter to our daily lives. Host Elizabeth Austen introduces my poem "Poem Without a Boar" and a recording of the poem made at my Jack Straw Writers reading in May.

Videos from the Yakima Valley Community College reading, 19 October, 2010

Recent Publication

Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets, Todd F. Davis and Erin Murphy (Editor). 2010

This anthology features the poem "How Flatterers Must Be Shunned" and the experimental "essay," "The Prince's Almond Trees" by Katharine Whitcomb

 

 

Artist's Note

I’m interested in intensity and consistency of voice in my poems. I have always been very engaged in the integrity of the line and the power of allowing a poem to find its true form—whether it be a prose poem or an open field composition or free verse couplets.

I want the “I” in the poems to transcend confessional solipsism and serve instead as a metaphoric guide and mirror to reader. Robert Duncan is one of my aesthetic mentors, as is Anne Carson. I hope my voice is half as intelligent and beguiling as their voices seem to me.

My themes explore what it means to be human, the “idea” of god, the mystery of death and nature in all its complexity. There is humor in those big ideas and sadness too. And always a celebration of beauty.