Jeff Epton's Outdoor Poetry Season

Refugees crying songs off-key, spent birds in unhinged swarms; some can hear, few can grasp, one or two or three, maybe, repeat;...

In a shrouded long ago, I asked a preacher, a Methodist, if he really believed in god. The question meant no outrage and met non...

Nathan Night Rain, you were an infant with apple cheeks and patience. Julie Anna, you were a witch baby, wise with foreknowle...

In which the previously unimaginable 25-syllable (26?) Son-Ku is introduced: Stupid with desire to be better, desire to be higher. Wallo...

Homage to W.S. Merwin Even if it’s junk, the pencil and the paper make more of it than writing. The fingertip feel, inside and ...

Some Gangster Pain So, I’ve owned this book, or a copy, anyway,  Some Gangster Pain , for some time. Gillian Conoley, the poet, has intro...

I know that when I go I’m gone. I know all my twisting, all my writhing, all these undulations, are no challenge to that tr...

When I sit to write whatever, I am writing anywhere but here. Why not stand, instead, and walk and run and jump and get to an...

When I thought of you standing there, posed in the doorway, watching the sunrise, your tank top a window to the long, rolling muscle...

Somewhere in the night she died, he said. They would look there for her, but she wouldn’t want to be found. I remember hangin...

I am not there to make hurt feelings worse— I am not there to fix something broken— I am not there to say what should happen—...

Oh, my sweetheart, this gut-twisting swamp of dirt and piss and recrimination, this dark side of devotion sucked away, is not w...

Thank you, my loves, for love. Thank you, my friends, for friendship. Thank you, comrades, for fierceness and music. Thank yo...

This is my first day outliving my father. His birth and death, August 25, 1921 – December 13, 1987. Twenty-six years to the day after ...

It is life affirming. Aspirational. Mythic. Who would not want to be a poet if that meant one could write like Joy Harjo? Her book The Wo...

“Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it,” the man sang and a friend, across the room said, “Those are two ...

and Something in the heart of a poet After I first write down a few lines for a poem, I might leave off for a bit, let thoughts percolate...

In the red feeling circle he wandered as though he might blow the next minute. Resting then waxing, drifting then winging thr...

For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka) Redwood grove and war You and me talking gender grief and ash I say, 'God! It's all so h...

I don't write      about poetry because a poem takes      pretty much all the energy I'm willing      to spare. Still, about...

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed till we heard blood dripping in the closet. I fell in love with a woman who could ring al...

It has always been obvious to my lovers and children, to comrades and friends, that I am an angry man. I didn’t start that way,...

The unnamed fog that stalks by day, is dark and deep and flips the pencil in my hand, erasing faster than I write. I am pummeled ...

I loved the moment leaving work behind, striding long, traveling lean, one job done, another to come. The way to where she was,...

Once I walked on a glorious day. Early light stroking greens, reds, and even the yellows to passionate fits, birds raising a unified ...