I recently returned from a trip to Greece, which has me thinking about Homer. Years ago I was astonished but convinced by the argument that the Iliad was not originally written, but was composed orally. Part of the evidence was gathered by Albert Lord, who journeyed through the Balkans and found men singing long traditional …
a letter from our friend Rong-Bang Peng in Taiwan Dear Mike, Jamie, and Una, Thank you for the heart-warming email. Mike, don’t blame yourself for not knowing what to say; in face of the Real, no words really convey. You know Li-Shen and I talk a lot, but in front of her suffering, I don’t …
Intertextuality, allusion, remembered scraps of poetry: all gifts we didn’t know we needed till they arrived. Three recent and very different, but all happy, examples: 1) Here in the country, I’m getting to spend some time with my 25 year-old son for the first time in many months. The other night, I said something to …
“Are you praying?” my mother asked, her voice quavering through the phone. She repeated it again and a sick silence followed. “No Maam…,” I stared at the floor and saw nothing. “Girl, you have to pray.” I nodded as if she could see me. In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. But she …
Memorial Day: We should mourn for all who have died because of militarism. May 31, 1993 I remember the first time I prayed for an enemy. It was just outside An Khe, a village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A helicopter gunship rocketed some North Vietnamese regulars who were about to attack us. I …
Last night I joined several other poets and an audience that crammed into an independent bookstore in my city. We were there to celebrate Uncle Walt—Whitman, that is. The host and organizer, a young poet who writes under the name of SliC (Stuart Livingston Canton), had assembled a range of readers from the poetry community, …
On the weekends, my mother hand-washed our clothes at the river. Bending over and slapping the clothes into the water, she would occasionally look up to see us flap around. We children teased the slippery current with our bodies, playing with other children as their mothers sliced the water with heavy clothes as well. At …
I have to interrupt a standardized test in order to give a standardized test. I am in the second week of giving a standardized test that isn’t a test, because nobody gives a wank about this test. The only reason we’re giving this test is because the district paid millions for it. We bought it, so …