I’d just like to say again how, in both quantity and quality, this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff exceeded my hopes. I’m deeply grateful for everyone’s participation and consider hosting such an outpouring of spring passion a high honor. Seeing writers come together to play and ply their craft has been inspiring, and my hopes for [...]
To read Part One, click here.
H. is unwilling to give up and is looking more closely at the little hole we might be able to climb in. I back up and find a passage behind a fallen slab about the size of a pancaked SUV leaning against the wall of rock. I tell H. and [...]
Every year an old friend and I undertake an adventure. H. and I are middle-aged now. Past our prime and youth when our adventures were bolder and more carefree. I can remember when we then, full of laughter, took his new pickup and rubbed its shiny sides against aspens for luck while searching out some [...]
It’s been a privilege and delight for Wilderness Interface Zone to host a spectacular flourish of spring poetry during this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff. In the kick-off post, I called for a show of green language, of creative élan and prospect-opening words. I asked for poetry that contained the recombinant stuff of fertile, world-making expression [...]
Bud of the vine, you came to me.
They named you Woinshet.
Let me see your hand; it is a sweet
soft shadow on mine. You brown ibex, leaping;
your dark eyes will laugh and roll to the side
when a stranger passes,
and your small throat is beating.
A coil, a doodle on my fingertip,
a card of silken fibers standing out [...]
The Spring Poetry Runoff Awards winners will be announced next Monday, May 23. I hope everyone can hold out that long, but unexpected delays and the quality of the poems submitted have made selecting a winner for the Admin Award a very tough choice.
In the meantime, our normally scheduled postings will continue.
While we’re teetering on the very edges of our seats gripping our arm rests watching the heated race for the Most Popular Poem Award, I have a few announcements I’d like to make.
Thanks to a gorgeous stream of entries, WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration ran even deeper into the season than did last year’s. And indeed, this year’s Runoff has been an inspiring show of green and fertile language, above and beyond what I had hoped. In fact, I’ve been wowed, not just by the craftsmanship [...]
We’ve had a chilly April in southeast Utah, but this year, my neighbor’s barn swallows and the local colonies of cliff swallows returned to their traditional nesting sites two or three weeks earlier than they did during the past two springs. A few hundred feet down the road at a cattle pond that drains an [...]
We are celebrating that spring came over and we did not even make a move
Move, he says to me, we need to keep moving
We’re moving, the ground is moving behind our feet
You know what I’m gonna do when I am older?
Nuclear weapons
I’m gonna do nuclear weapons
I’m gonna do nuclear weapons with geraniums
See those geraniums how [...]