a poem is a sermon
When you play the blues, at some point, you’ve got to decide. Whether to play around the issue, like Charlie Parker, flitting in and out just hinting at the melody, giving subtle suggestions on the point you’re trying to make but usually ending up burning out to some tangent at the far reaches of reality; […]
Perhaps the world is full of verse that fails, inspiring none to act as heroes should; and in frustration, lesser poets rail against the confine and form of the good, their self-aggrandized talents gone to waste that they alone lament through sleepless nights spent in a fruitless embrace of the chaste. Would you have these […]
for W.B. Yeats Some silken strains of angst-encrusted verse or mystic message wrapped in words to woo designed to part the patron from their purse, or charm one’s snakes…what can these small things do? An audience that can be misdirected by such a simple ruse, where is their strength and will to fight against being […]
Poverty, Illiteracy, Hunger, Drugs, and ultimately what I’d like to address, Terrorism. Does it appear to anyone but myself that our great “national” causes (that we cast as decisive “battles” since Johnson’s Great Society and its War on Poverty) deal primarily with the symptoms, and not their underlying causes? Let’s take Terrorism, for one. Terrorism […]
In my last few posts, I was lamenting the fact that my generation seems to be missing writer voices. Well, I just picked up Rolling Stone issue 947, that included an interview with Chris Rock. I’ve always appreciated his comedy on a number of levels; but something he said in this interview struck a chord […]
Continue reading "Add Chris Rock to the List of My Generation"
“I know it when I see it,” said the man who vainly tried conveying truth to friends. “When it is absent, the space that it leaves unfilled describes it clearly, end to end; and though there are no words to put it plain, nor etchings I could render without flaw, there is a quality about […]
In California after eating they called up to offer a greeting, their plates filled with beans and broccoli ours with roast beef and mashed potatoes. We passed the telephone back and forth, discussing children and work; of course, we spoke of weather and summer plans, the price of groceries and minivans, and then of mom, […]