perspective

I am surviving (a poem)

2016/10/21

A shadorma that I feel better about. Earlier this week, a woman named Deborah Danner was killed by New York police responding to a 911 call from her neighbors. Ms. Danner had schizophrenia; it seems likely she was having some sort of episode related to her illness. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial about her, in which they linked to an essay (shared by her lawyer) that she wrote four years ago. Many of the things she wrote about in the essay are familiar to me—I have lived with anxiety and panic attacks since 1989.

The stanzas in this poem roughly correspond to the paragraphs in Ms. Danner’s essay, but they also reflect my own experience.

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Opposite Day (a poem)

2015/06/24

Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write a poem about opposites—specifically, to make two lists of characteristics, with one list being the opposite of the other, then writing a poem in two voices, going back and forth between the lists. I took a different approach to the theme…

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A brief rumination on the meaning of a flag (a poem)

2015/06/14

Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write a poem for Flag Day. Although the prompt suggests writing specifically about the American flag—and I did keep that in mind—I concerned myself more with the meaning of flags in general, because the meaning of a flag can shift for any number of reasons…

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A mid-May morning (a poem)

2015/05/13

I had not particularly intended to follow today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, which is to listen to jazz or classical music, make notes of what comes to mind while you listen, then write a poem about something you thought of while listening. As it turned out, I started this poem while listening to one of Thelonious Monk’s solo recordings on Pandora…

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