About

Welcome to Word Medicine, Bill Prindle’s author site.

Bill is deepening his voice in the third half of life. His poetry seeks the seams between the human and nonhuman worlds, working to forge a new reciprocity that restores heart to our lives. Using his experience wandering in forests, using plant medicine, driving on practicing restorative agriculture on his five acres, and shifting his attention from the world he fears to the one he wants, his poetry is both personal and collective, introspective and prophetic, reminiscent and present.

He is inspired by many poets, of all ages, races, genders, and beliefs. But as someone writing as a white male of a certain age, he confesses his admiration for a few dead white men. Such as Yeats (excerpted from Sailing to Byzantium):

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress

Or Eliot (from The Four Quartets):

As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment…
Old men ought be explorers…
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion

He has won multiple Poetry Society of Virginia awards, and has been published in Verse-Virtual, Streetlight Magazine and its 2021 anthology, Sandy River Journal, Tupelo Press’ Thirty Days anthology, the Written River Journal, and the What Rough Beast journal. He has studied with Lisa Russ Spahr, Neil Perry, Gregory Orr, Sharon Olds, and C.K. Williams. He lives with his wife in the woods near Charlottesville, Virginia.