After I received my PhD in English at Texas Tech in 1997, I taught English at Tech as a Visiting Professor for one year and at University of Mary-Hardin Baylor until May 2011. I was chair of the department there from 2001 to 2009. I directed the Writers' Festival from 2002-2010 and edited Windhover from 2002-2011. My obligations with the festival and journal prompted me to learn to write poetry. The effort is not an easy one for someone who had grown accustomed to hunting for variants in seventeenth century manuscripts of the poetry of John Donne or who had become comfortable meandering from baseball fields with one child to soccer fields with the next. Writing poetry required a new kind of attention, a different sense of what was happening around me. At some point, somewhere in there, writing poetry changed me. I'll let you figure out how by reading the poems, but you might begin by also reading Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy and Percy Shelley's Defense of Poetry. If you do, you'll find something about how metaphor is connected to charity, sympathy, and being human.In August 2011, I will begin a new position. I have accepted a position as Associate Professor and Chair of Languages and Literature at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I am looking forward to new challenges and opportunities.
My poems often begin with a personal experience, but many of them have nothing to do with me directly. Most are simply my take on the things I see. Many involve paradoxes (a nod to Donne, I suppose) or outright contradictions (my own cynical and overwrought sense of justice is the likely culprit). I hope you enjoy the poems.
