I try to write as well as I can, with as much craft as I can muster, and tend to revise my work a great deal. "Shadblow" is part of a series of poems I wrote on my back yard, an on-going project. These poems include "Iris," available on my Akron U. webpage (http://www3.uakron.edu/uapress/minczeski.html), and a sequence of 12 sonnet-like poems on a Japanese Tree Lilac in the yard as it bloomed two years ago. For quite some time I have been interested in dramatic situations in poetry-for example, at the heart of Circle Routes are poems about people making decisions based on conscience, and the consequences of those decisions. I am currently working on a sequence of poems based on religious paintings from the Renaissance focusing on a kind of extended argument with God. Other poems of mine are available on-line at Mr. Cogito—
http://www.mrcogito.freeservers.com/
John Minczeski is author of four collections of poetry. His most recent, Circle Routes, was chosen by Mary Oliver for the 2000 Akron Poetry Prize. His awards and honors include the 2000 Lullwater Poetry Prize (awarded by Lullwater Review, a literary publication of Emory University, Atlanta), 3rd Grand Prize in Atlanta Review's 2001 International Poetry Competition, fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Foundation, a Loft-McKnight Award in Creative Prose, a travel grant from the Jerome Foundation, and others. Having worked for years as a poet in the schools through COMPAS and other residency programs, he has also taught creative writing at Macalester College and St. Cloud State University, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Minnesota for the spring, 2003 term. His recent poems appear in Agni, Quarterly West, Meridian, Pleiades, Free Lunch, Minnesota Monthly, Mid American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Marlboro Review, Cream City Review, The Cape Rock, Crania (an online literary magazine), and others. His critical essay on the poetry and prose of Natalie Kusz appeared in Something of My Very Own To Say, an anthology on women writers of Polish-American descent, published by the Eastern European Monograph Series of Columbia University Press. Minczeski, who holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, was on the founding boards of both The Loft Literary Center and SASE, The Write Place in the Twin Cities.