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One of the great gifts of being Poet Laureate is that in my travels I get to meet the poets of Indiana. Life’s pace, of course, can keep us away from meeting as many of our fellow poets as we need to (which is one reason I am providing this Continue Reading →

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Sometimes we meet a poet, or a poem, or a line of verse that changes our lives. Sometimes it is simply a word. We meet a word. For after all, we as humans—among others in the animal kingdom—have a language that our animal sisters and brothers do not. We have Continue Reading →

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The exuberance I felt in my first encounter with the poems of Bonnie Maurer—I can still remember it clearly. It was the late 1970s, and Bonnie’s work crossed my desk, and I was entranced. Here was a poetry that included seriousness, sorrow, and yet play. Here was a voice, deeply Continue Reading →

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I first met Richard Pflum in Bloomington in the late 1970s. He was one of a group of hard-working and established poets, all of whom I greatly admired—writers who helped homestead a fertile poetry ground in Indianapolis and Bloomington, a group which included Alice Friman, Tom Hastings, Roger Pfingston, Jim Continue Reading →