a poem is a sermon
What a record label’s looking for I haven’t got a clue; it doesn’t really matter any more. And who’s at number one or rising up to number two? I’ve stopped pretending that I’m keeping score. I don’t expect the radio to leave familiar ground; they’ll play what advertisers think they need. And the movers and […]
Would that this night provide some small respite, sweet sleep instead of wisps of restless dream; but like a spring o’er-wound and pulled too tight, my mind finds no repose. Each small sound seems a thunderclap that echoes in the dark and leaves behind a wake that does not fade, while every thought like striking […]
It occurs to me that all poets at some point in their lives experience something of the profound, and the nature of this experience colors and informs their writing from that point forward. Robert Graves might have said it is the presence of the White Goddess that is that initiating profundity, that point at which […]
The spheres of thought that tangents bring in touch with mine are lessening, perhaps in spite of my attempts to cross each bridge, and burn each fence so that the world seems more to me a web of connectivity. It could be that these are not times for straying beyond party lines; or worse, more […]
Continue reading "The spheres of thought that tangents bring"
A moment, more or less, of deconstruction: by which I mean to delve into the soul that strives to separate life from destruction and yet maintain some semblance of the whole, to claim by sacred right the single kernel, the isolated truth-soaked grain of sand that by its presence negates the infernal in concrete terms […]
Rescind your tortured sentences; let words escape like AWOL soldiers past the fence, like sullen rocks that would grow wings like birds and fly out into fresh experience. Rethink your injured poems; let each line cascade in a cacophony of sound where all the images you dare define in simple rhythm’s ancient tongues resound. Don’t […]
Truth be told, my high school years were difficult ones. Having been transplanted from a remote rural environment in northwestern Ohio to the sunny clime of southern California just in time to start high school, I found it difficult to adapt, in many ways, to the Members Only jacket, Izod shirt, Sperry Top-sider wearing preppy […]
Continue reading "The Confessions of an Optimistic Underachiever"