A Poem a Day

...lovely and electric...
[from a winner of the National Poetry Series]

Poem a Day Project

On March 18, 2000, I decided to end a lengthy poetry-writing slump by writing a poem a day. With only a few missed days here and there I've kept it up until now. After 8 years of writing this way, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really a very good poet. I had ambitions to use the material produced this way as material for submissions to poetry journals, collections that I'd submit to contests, etc. Instead, I've dribbled out some of the poems to a magazine here and there, and published a very humble chapbook. I've decided to put the yearbooks up on this site. Here they are:

Sharp Tone (2000–2001) [pdf]

Noisy, Smells Strongly, or Can’t Be Aligned (2002) [pdf]

For Stone Is Stubborn (2003) [pdf]

Limitations on Framing the Question (2004) [pdf]

Café Jitters (2005) [pdf]

Not a Gate of Hell But Its Doorknob (2006) [pdf]

Metaphor Police (2007) [pdf]

Shared Fraud (2008) [pdf]

Donate Here (2008) [pdf], poems from Squaw Valley 2008

Lies and Their Falsehoods (2009) [pdf], including a draft of the novel Traditional Salvation

Everything I Mean Everything (2010) [pdf]

Imagine Writing This; Imagine It's About You (2011) [pdf]

Nothing Else / Nothing More (2012) [pdf]

A Life Spent on the Trampoline of Amnesia (2013) [pdf]

The Romance of Homelessness (2014) [pdf]

Dunking Distracted Sardines (2015) [pdf]

The Authority of the Air Conditioner (2016) [pdf]

The Half-Deep-Fat-Fried Ship-Towed Long-Range Acoustic Detection System (2017) [pdf]

The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech (2018) [pdf]

Working Of The Eye To The Work (2019) [pdf]

Tuned Adrenaline: A Beat-Boogied Headful (2019) [pdf], a chapbook in memory of Ron Goldman

The Bosks Are Thorny, Grim, and Icky (2020) [pdf]

Many, Strong, Narrow, Shallow, Red (2021) [pdf]

Nothing To Inscribe But Stones (2022) [pdf]

100 Poems Imitating 100 Translations (2020) [pdf], collection of poems responding to “100 Poets, One Song Each,” by my friend John Gribble.

Tergiversations (2017) [pdf], a selection from “Tergiversations” and “The Pentagle,” my high school literary magazine from 1967, created for the occasion of our 50th reunion.