Explore Amazing Poetry

I came to poetry the long way — through courtrooms and boardrooms, through a probation office where I answered for thirty-one people and the hard end of other people’s lives. I built companies. I read budgets aloud to elected officials. And underneath all of it something kept asking a different question. At the Joseph Campbell Foundation I spent years tending his words — negotiating the rights to his books, then sitting with the recordings and transcribing his voice one sentence at a time. I studied depth psychology at Pacifica. Somewhere in there I stopped treating myth as an interest and started treating it as the instrument it is.

Because a poem does real work. It goes down to where the story got stuck, names the thing you have been circling for years, and in the naming the grip loosens. That is what the Mythopoesis Institute is for. Five of my poems live in A Wind Blows Through Us: A Festival of Men’s Poetry, and a first book is underway. I record the Poetry Oracle Podcast — thirty-two episodes so far, and beginning again now at a poem a week — and keep a growing repository of poems for whoever needs one. And I sit with people — alone and in groups — at the hour when the usual language runs out: grief, threshold, the season that will not yield to a framework. However you arrived here, you are welcome.