There, there, said the parent to the anguished child whose ice cream fell to the gutter. There! There! said the whale watcher pointing at the spout on the horizon. There’s no there there, said Gertrude Stein when she visited Oakland in 1934 and found her childhood home razed to the ground. In what they called … Read more
There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject: If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first … Read more
May the tide carry you out beyond the face of fear. Three poems for Sunday. Yesterday it snowed and I made tartar sauce – just mayonnaise, lemon juice, mustard and a chopped pickle – to go with the cubes of frozen fish. And today they say the temperature will rise into the 60s F. We … Read more
Politics without mercy, demonic world events, power without responsibility, nature takes flight. National Insecurity The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has … Read more
One thing always leads to another on the intertubes and this particular ravel started with my friend David Nice. David is a cultural critic and musicologist who maintains a wonderful blog – I’ll Think of Something Later – where he writes about music and travel and culture and all the life in between. In response … Read more
These days find me busy clearing and chucking, sorting and sifting, storing and saving. Three truck loads of stuff cleared by the junk removers, hundreds of books donated to the Poughkeepsie Library and wardrobes full of clothing to the Salvation Army. And still there’s more. As I clear out the clutter and crap and treasure … Read more
It’s a late afternoon on a winter Saturday of my childhood. And that means the big Ferguson radio – the one that had the exotic place names on the dial – Hilversum, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Limoges, Toulouse – is warmed up. The fire is lit, the coal scuttle is full and the kettle is on. And … Read more
I love this poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a commentary on the fact that – even in the darkest times – simple acts of unexpected generosity and kindness have the capacity to remind us that not everything is bleak and hopeless even in a nasty, brutish, trumpian world. Optimistic Little Poem Now and then … Read more
There’s a drainage ditch runs alongside the rail trail where we often take our morning stroll. It runs with water after rain and provides an excellent damp environment for the cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis). It’s a showy deep red spiky flower native to the US. Apparently most insects find it difficult to navigate the long … Read more
Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it. It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came … Read more
Some left over words from another post and borrowed words not exactly put to music. Boundaries blur. The streetlamp a smudge. Steps behind you muffled. Stop. When you stop. The roots that clutch. Do they follow? Who is the figure in the window, watching? Nerves are bad tonight, yes bad. Just the street and the … Read more
In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.: I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and … Read more
It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia. May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response … Read more
I’ve been looking for a particular poem for a while now. When someone used the hashtag #SherlockPoems in a Twitter conversation I posted my inquiry. The poem I remember – but can’t find – is about a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits. It was used in a GSE exam paper sometime … Read more
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver … Read more