Note: The essay below is reprinted from my e-book, Nowhere Slow. Though I might word it differently now, I haven’t changed it. A Spell of Remembering, Written in Eight Leaves The first leaf makes everything smooth The flower of the likehdou blends from sunset purple at the edges to a deep bruised color in…
Continue readingA Spell of Remembering, Woven in Eight Leaves
Adelaide Crapsey (1878 – 1914) invented a form called American cinquain based on Japanese tanka. Instead of a syllabic form (5-7-5-7-7 in the tanka) the cinquain is based on stress patterns with a 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 1 stress pattern. The pattern is often iambic (two syllables, with the second syllable…
Continue readingJapanese Influence on American Poetry: Adelaide Crapsey
In commemoration of my first known bout with Covid, on Sept. 14, 2024 (yes, I had quite a run!), here’s a poem I wrote pre-pandemic. It’s a historical smallpox poem based on an 1892 NY Times article about one Mr. Green. He was a prosperous fellow whose family, a wife and six children, succumbed to…
The loss — of land, of food, of tradition — is due to who controls modernity, not from ignorance on the part of traditional society.
Time has marched on from year-end review season. I did think, briefly, to write a top-ten post but soon realized that I no longer really know what’s new, old, re-issued, re-hashed, re-recorded. Spotify says my top two artists are Alejandro Escovedo and Jean Sibelius. Only one is alive and neither had new music in 2023.…
St. John Lutheran Church in Forest Park, IL was established in 1867 in what was then known as Harlem. In 1967 they held a Centennial service. The service was pressed into an LP. You can listen to it below (keep scrolling) and follow along in the bulletin. Here are the mp3 files of the LP.…
An artificial intelligence creating authentic art in 19th Century England. Image by Dall-E on Bing. (yeah, bing, OK?)
I’m not a list guy or, if I can help it, even a calendar guy or, given my druthers, even a “passing of time’ guy. As Arlo Guthrie once said, “What care I for time?” You just go inch by inch, row by row until you get a zucchini. Though I aspire to be outside…
I wish David Graeber were around to update his book Bullshit Jobs. From “essential worker” to “quiet quitting,” mainstream culture has found a way to underscore his thesis: a large percentage of jobs are bullshit, and the people performing them are aware of this fact (much to their psychic detriment). Essential workers are non-BS jobs.…
I’ve got too many things to do — work piling up, plans to hatch, work to revise, children to raise, dogs to walk, etc. all that stuff plus I have to tend my garden and keep the house from falling apart. So, yeah, perfect time to spend a day making a Spotify playlist of Kinks…
Continue readingThe Ray (and Dave) Davies Songbook — a kovers playlist with komment
