Best American Poetry 2022
I realized in my teens that the only thing I was really interested in was poetry, and everything I did had to do with that. My mother had a reverence for poetry and knew a great deal by heart, and we were trained to memorize at a young age and grew up with the Oxford Book of English Verse and American Verse as primary books in the house. Her Aunt was a Canadian poet who lived very simply in a wilderness retreat called Abbey Dawn with her husband, a Canadian gunner in the RAF who was shot down over Germany in WWI, and after a long time in a German prison camp just wanted the life of a woodsman in the Great Lakes. So for us from the beginning poetry was connected with nature, and with a kind of religious feeling too- a traditional perspective I think, and very American. It had to do with looking closely at things, with the translation of the visual world. There was an awareness, probably coming from WWI, that everything falls apart, but poetry lasts. Later as I looked at other languages I was keenly aware of words having a tactile quality, a closeness to the physical thing.

Like a lot of people of my generation, I imagine, as I look back I am very happy to have been alive when I was, when there were no cellphones and you could go anywhere and nobody knew you, and those who did didn’t know where you were. I spent a long time in Egypt, a spectacular environment not unlike the Finger Lakes where I come from, an environment dominated by water.

I am publishing a book of poetry and watercolors called Water that begins with something I wrote on the beach on Stocking Island in the Bahamas where we used to go in the wintertime, a poem in which I am just describing what I see. The book is a sort of American Zen album like the albums of China and Japan with images from nature and poems beside them. I published a book like this called Trees in the middle of my second book Wolves and Honey and include pages from both books below:

Water: Conch shell watercolor, Stocking Island

Trees: Cicada, Thaw, Cicatrix

The cicatrix is the definition in Webster’s Dictionary