I'm thinking about Kate Hardings excellent post on Broadsheet today, June 6, 2009, on criticism of Sarah Palin's “message to her children.” I urge you to read it because it does point out that women in politics still face a simplistic and cruel double standard, and no matter what we… Read full post »

Recently the contest to elect the new Oxford Professor of Poetry rose to the front of British News sites when the distinguished Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott dropped from the race after concerns were raised, anonymously, about his conduct with female students in previous teaching positions. The st… Read full post »

In the Daffodil kingdom

The Red-Wing Black Bird,

The Great Blue Heron and

The Purple Finch

Herald the resurrection

Of the crucified vines.

Stretched out in rows

like the army of Spartacus,

Victims of a sumptuous empire,… Read full post »

here we stand electing

hope to counter fear,

The things we are protecting

things that we hold dear.

Will we remember last September

when the water rises above our knees?

Will we tender any pretender

with rights to hold both locks and… Read full post »

I set out to dedicate my performance of MacBeth as an offering to theWhite Goddess, the lunar mother of passion,  creativity, destruction, magic and madness that Robert Graves identified as the source of all true poetry. Like many supplicants I've been hoping that my offering would inspire the d… Read full post »

   I've wanted to play MacBeth since I first read Shakespeare's tragedy of ambition, witchcraft and madness when I was seventeen. It has been thirty years and now at long last I have been cast as the bewitched Thane of Glamis in a production at my local junior college. This is… Read full post »