These words—fierce and lonesome—hold hands, become mates. A dynamic combo, explosive ammo for the writer. I can’t help but think my lonesomeness makes me fierce. Out of hours and hours of being just one in a universe of many, there comes not a torch song, but torched words, each with its own touché. It has …
My mother is slipping slowly now. She has no sense of the real world around her. Yesterday, she told my sister that she is flying. When sis asked her where she’s flying to, Mother answered, “To heaven.” I find myself in this strange world that my wife Phoebe calls, simply, a death watch. I’m …
Today a thought descended: language possesses a lost luminosity. It paired itself with a further one: language is the primitive refined by the writing that wrenches us into being. These two notions feel right to me, complete. Writing as quest, as a hunter going after the scent of music inside every word. Like wine tasters, …
I guess like most writers I’d like to defeat time. I’d like the dead to live on forever, along with some trees, flowers, birds and insects I’ve known. At some point a seed was planted, and it continues to sprout through my eyes, my ears, my mouth—even my nose (that bloodhound for the troubles of …
The coach has classes of sixty. That’s OK, though, because some of our language classes, say Advanced Chinese, have four kids, so our average high school class size is 32, the exact state maximum. The coach is holding down his end of the arithmetic average. Anyway, three weeks ago the school closed the gym for renovations, …
Poetry needs immediacy. Just about everyone agrees about this, hence so much writing in 1st person, present tense. What is less commonly considered in poetry’s demand for intimacy and just as real intimacy is difficult between real people, the intimacy between the poet and poem is equally challenging. This means honing in, bearing down upon …
I was always disappointed that I wasn’t beaten during high school. That’s because I’m Catholic. Catholics are supposed to be beaten by nuns, or at least have little scars on our knuckles to prove that we took piano lessons. So it was with some relief that yesterday I had this recovered memory. The nuns hated …
I’m not quite sure what got me thinking about Irina Ratushinskaya recently but something did, and brought back how closely I followed her work during the Eighties; poets all over the world took her case very personally. Many of us wrote letters protesting her imprisonment and asking for her release. (Here is a link to …