About Me
After a childhood in Connecticut and Vermont, I migrated south to attend graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, and have lived in the North Carolina Piedmont for over 40 years. I taught poetry and earned a Ph.D. in English before leaving academia to become a writer, editor, bookstore proprietor, and website designer, the latter at IBM, where I settled into a career after learning the hard way not to try supporting a family of four on a poet’s salary.
Currently, I design websites for poets and other creative people. My poems have appeared in over 40 publications, and my collection The Way the Rain Works won the 2015 Sable Books Chapbook Prize. I have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and co-manage a monthly poetry reading series at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill.
Ralph reads and discusses his poems
Enjoy this reading and discussion from March 16, 2024, from a Zoom gathering of “Writers’ Morning Out,” a group affiliated with the North Carolina Poetry Society (1 hour, 24 minutes).
My approach to poetry
When I was young I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that poetry would enable me to follow the breath-taking possibilities promised by Language, my first love, toward Truth, or at least toward something that pointed to Truth, in all its nuances and contradictions.
My budding academic career felt like a big “Truth and Beauty Game,” so I extricated myself and after a decade of freelance writing and teaching gigs, found myself as a corporate software engineer, a field in which at least the stakes are obvious. Like so many before and after, I have always continued to weave poetry into my day-to-day routine.
In one way or another, my poems deal with the expectations of family, class, and gender, and how the inability to meet those expectations becomes both a burden and a saving grace. Inevitably, the poems also deal with the consolations that emerge after what you think you wanted has crumbled and vanished.
And of course they deal, as Richard Powers puts it, with the “hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last,” love for Family, Self, Ideals, Ideas, the Absolute, the Absurd, the Ruin, and the Radiance.