We don’t author our biographies. We sculpt them, chipping and chiseling, peeling back the onionskin strata accretions of time, calcified history. The layers of remaindered remnants. What’s been piled on previous to our arrival taunts just beyond our reach, like the inscrutable object of desire who can’t and will not ever requite our boundless love....
Sitting on a bench beside a Scottish canal, watching the locks rising and the Lochs glowing he crossed his legs and placed his hands upon worn corduroy wales that had seen much of the civilized world. “It’s a beautiful world,” he said, smiling, an eternal boy peering from behind octogenarian eye-creases. “It’s a beautiful world....
“House Hour” is the second installment in the landmark “PoemJazz” collaboration between poet Robert Pinsky and pianist Laurence Hobgood. Everything that was good in the debut is even better here. Pinsky has mastered his instrument, transforming his voice from “peculiar” to “unique.” Hobgood’s musicality and virtuosity dazzles. And the production — the mix, the equalization, the...
The powerless feel invisible. A ghostly cipher jigs and shimmies, sending up flares, announcing the Annunciation. The powerful seek invisibility. A malevolent cloud overhangs and shrouds, secreted in cracks, hidden from the light. We evaporate and expectorate and obviate. No one sees everything.
These are not theories, conjecture, reckless reckoning, supposition, hyperbolic hypotheses crooked as a triangle untangled by Isosceles. These are facts. Yet many of us prefer to pretend instead that the precise contrary is not a fairy tale but a fairly stale debate over which the irrational fantastical religious folks can masturbate. So I shall spell...
Didn’t he warn you? Didn’t she scorn you? Hadn’t they found you? Wouldn’t they astound you? You who couldn’t differentiate between abiding love and aberrant hate? Time will obviate the degradation of your sensate mind and accelerate the assignation of honorifics, burrowing within the fissures of tissue held together by gravity. Were you...
The 2015 MK Spring Poetry Festival, April 20-30 Mother protector, father provider. Brother who helped the elderly. Sister who held children when they cried. Potential saints, condemned sinners. The heretic and the ignorant. The past-tense blasphemous visitors gone before He arrived to save them. What of them? All the others. The ones who lived...
Splayed on her sofa like a hastily disposed corpse haphazardly stashed out of the way of more important harbingers of Life, she watches the screens, the big one on the wall and the little one in her demure hand, waiting for the next plot point, the next map point, the point of all her affluent solitude,...
EXCERPTED FROM “How The Revolution Started: Essays & Impertinent Thoughts “(Eggy Press). This is not an insult. This is merely a minor reminder mainly meant to catapult adult minds toward new thinking instead of the usual repeated drinking of the poisoned Kool-Aid propagated by the war-machine cult. At least that’s the expected result! This is...
This is a reminder, not an insult: There’s no dictionary you could consult, no thesaurus or magic lexicon that describes the Pentagon as a paragon of peace. More like Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s most important ally in convincing the populous that what’s best for us is constant war and mayhem, the lubricating grease on the...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
