A native of Johnstown, NY, I retired in June 2016 after 29 years of teaching writing and literature at Ripon College in Wisconsin.  I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession.  Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online.  In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry.  A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz​​

Pat Paulsen (1927-1997) for President


He's not the first dead man
to toss his hat in the ring, which is 
just one thing I love about this country.

He's also not much deader than some
embalmed on the campaign trail— 
rigorous smilers, cadaverous wavers.

And Pat still has the courage to speak
gobbledewobble to power.  If elected,
he pledges firm regression and foreclosing

to the fullest maze, expecting no droop,
no gleets, and absolutely no madge.
For these are, in all honesty, 

the times we live in, all Americans
respursive and indelible together,
clecking the marginals and feed corn alike.

So vote early and often, my fellow citizens,
confident in the knowledge.  And I say,
be not deep fried.  You'll be glad you died.  




Why I Love America


Like America, I love having reasons I don't need, 
like I love the smell of American bubblegum
and the imperial amazement of interstates
—we invented interstates, world!--

and of course I love blues and jazz
and Charles Ives and his crazy fedora,
not to mention Abe Lincoln and Hank Williams
—we invented Abe and Hank!— 

I love how we take everybody in
and make them American if need be, 
from Charlie Chaplin to Bob Hope and Neil Young
—and we have the best Cary Grants in the world!--

I love how even when I'm not paying attention
baseball is being played, seriously, in America,
played by Dominican, Japanese, and Cuban guys
—the world is nuts about our baseball!--

Needless to say I adore bluegrass
and pale watery beer, wine by the tanker truck
bound for every supermarket, wine so cheap
even I can pretend to be a snob!

The only country where Bob Dylan and 
Johnny Cash could get famous and rich—as singers!
We like scruffy, ragged, whiny voices in America
—the kind of scratchy voice Whitman had!— 

I love skateboards, Motown, self-serve gas,
the Outer Banks, and a certain mountain valley
in Virginia filling at dusk with fireflies
—do they have fireflies in Egypt?  Mexico?— 

I love the Constitution, Niagara Falls,
the Tappan Zee, Macintoshes whether fruit
or computer, Dolly Parton, Huck Finn
—put Dolly anywhere else, she'd vanish— 

I love that Ben Franklin invented the glasses
I'm wearing, that he started a lending library
and even now appears on the hundred dollar bill
—and isn't it great how we can call him Ben?— 

You may wonder just how sappy I can get,
if there's anything I don't love about America,
and I will probably just stare back at you
from under my baseball cap, wondering

if I'm truly a sap or you're an idiot 
for asking—the answer is of course I'm a sap,
you idiot, but I hate America just as much as you
—Granddad America spouting racist nonsense— 

and there's little need, as I see it, to keep
enumerating Hiroshima and Wounded Knee
as if that's all, when anyway it's all being swept
down the big muddy along with Ty Cobb and Scott Joplin

and even old Andrew Carnegie, that heartless,
penny-pinching Scot that America transformed
into a philanthropist at the end
—thank you, Andrew, for my hometown library!— 

So thank you, America, for being big enough
to take in all praise and all blame
without filling up, as the Mississippi and Hudson
run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full. . . .





Who Cooks for You?


Voices carry far over the lake,
especially at night.  The barred owl
could be a half mile away, perched
in the oldest pine on Pine Island,
yet sounds as if it’s in the next room,
talons gripping a bedpost, staring
at some dead uncle or aunt as they
sigh and thrash in restless sleep.
When you’ve lived one place
long enough most of the voices
arrive over the dark water
from the well-loved dead, their
spirits long since become wind
and wave, and thus never finished 
arriving or going away.