I arrived at Civitella having recently published my first poetry collection a few months before and expected to begin writing new poems and revising drafts I’d brought with me. While I did write and revise some poems, what I really experienced, however, was much...
“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life,” wrote poet Anna Akhmatova, and I agree– I know that Civitella will keep returning to me. It has nourished the soul of my work and created a reservoir filled with rolling hills, long...
The Hard Work of Going Away For a Long Time The sky moves above the data grid its waves sweetly gather and disperse like pay when I think of the grass and its underside I hear how love can be a terrain end- less with wind and customized to human willingness the sky...
Cathedral Not that I needed reminding, but even the trees, the trees! Like giant awestruck afros grown in the laboratory of a mad brother, the nerdy Nerudian of my dreamswho’s somehow isolated the colors of all the saddest love songs in the world—Baby, baby...
At Civitella Ranieri, I had a lot of time alone with my thoughts, and that was unsettling at first because I am used to writing with what I now realize is the comfort of distractions. Everything that distracts me back home is part of a familiar routine. Conversely,...
