Notes from an evening walk with my wife on my birthday’s eve, 2021: Archipelago of clouds infused with hues of lavender and pink, something feeling more refined and elevated than mere references to cotton candy in the evening sky, a chain of islands ephemeral and conjuring the Pacific, serene Read more…
In Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers,” she writes: “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember Read more…
“The Fish,” a poem, comes from my forthcoming chapbook, San Agustinillo. I wrote it in the winter of 2020 before a pandemic sent the world into upheaval and my sons came home from school to stay. I had been working steadily on the chapbook, then set it aside. I’m now Read more…
Overview: In this solo episode, Adam Williams kicks off an occasional series called “A Poet Was There.” Adam reads his poem, “I Want Poets,” which is his kernel of inspiration for the series, praising poets as essential truth tellers, the ones who are most equipped to help us understand the Read more…
Editor’s Note: This profile series called “A Poet Was There” highlights poets from around the world who through their verse convey the kind of intimacy, truth and connection with place and experience that only exists because a poet was there. Read “A Poet Was There: Introducing A New Blog Series” Read more…
“No words to describe it. … They should’ve sent a poet.” ~ “Ellie Arroway,” in Contact I published a poem, “I Want Poets,” in 2018 with this opening line: When another’s world, another’s life, another’s tether to all that is is frayed and on fire, I want a poet to Read more…
Jack Kerouac seems to get the most attention of the Beat poets and writers. Allen Ginsberg is like the Paul McCartney to Jack’s John (or is it the other way around?). But Lawrence Ferlinghetti was always there. A presence. That’s how I perceived it anyway, though I never quite seemed Read more…
I think there was a time I knew how to create just to create in a way that I sometimes forget now. To create for that something it gives you in the heart just to do it, no particular outcome in mind. No self-expectation of “success,” like, say, publishing or Read more…
Writing poetry has gotten less time from me of late. I started 2020 on a mission to complete a chapbook of poetry (and some photography) from time spent in San Agustinillo, on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Then the upheaval that would be the year that this has been. I Read more…
I Want Poets /// When another’s world, another’s life, another’s tether to all that is is frayed and on fire, I want a poet to tell me what it feels like to bring me into the pain and the valor, the intensity and exhaustion, to make me wish I didn’t Read more…
Overview: Jamal Parker is a two-time International Slam Poetry Champion. He grew up in Japan, where he first explored his poetry, and in Florida, where as a teenager he first came to recognize the politics of race with the murder of Trayvon Martin nearby. In this conversation, we cover a range Read more…
A lot happened with me and Humanitou in 2018, its first full year. Here are some gratitudes and highlights from the past 12 months, and some glimpses of what’s in the works for the coming year. Thank You … The list of good things below comes with credit due to Read more…
A prose poem from a hike with my sons in Bear Creek Canyon in Colorado. Caretaker’s House They call it creepy and want to leave. But first they ask me to knock on the front door of the cottage painted in government tanyellow, capped with a roof of corrugated brown. Read more…
I spend a lot of time in self-inquiry. Always have, but now it’s in much more frequent, even formalized, ways with yoga and poetry and creativity. Even in Humanitou conversations, when I’m asking questions of others, it’s honest probe into myself by way of our common humanness. Immersion in one’s Read more…
I lived a summer in a backpack in Europe. In hostels and trains. In two alternating sets of T-shirts and shorts, and a pair of sandals. I roamed the continent alone shooting 35 mm film and writing things that I sure hope will reemerge from boxes or journals I’ve yet Read more…
The poem below is a #showyourwork slice of what I’m eyeing for my next chapbook. I published Echoes of Oms earlier this year and now I’ve cleared some projects to a point I can return to San Agustinillo. San Agustinillo is a small fishing village on the Pacific, in the Read more…
Another prose poem and photograph from the #trailyoga and #showyourwork files. Bird I don’t know why he did that, why he stuck the toe of his shoe against your head and body, and flipped you rolling in the dirt and rock. The savage. I saw you first. Whole and still, Read more…
From a morning trail yoga stroll among the mountains: Another look into the unfolding process of a photography project, poetry and yoga. Husks of life small and quiet offer whispers of what they once held when they alighted on grainy walls of rock red, buried in millennia of revolutions Translucent Read more…
It doesn’t take much to set a poem in motion. Driving down a stretch of highway named for a U.S.S. Arizona survivor, a man who experienced the bombing of Pearl Harbor and came through it. What did he see? What can he say of what he felt? I sat in Read more…
A prose poem, “Cottonwoods in the Valley,” from a session of trail yoga spent low and slow in the Garden of the Gods. Like I’m coming into the scene of a cold case, one left to linger in the open air for all to witness, evidence strewn, dried and decaying. Read more…