“Benediction” Pale brown Moses went down to Egypt landTo let somebody’s people go.Keep him out of Florida, no UN there:The poor governor is all alone,With six hundred thousand illiterates.America, I forgive you…I forgive youNailing black…
Browsing Category Arts
War Poetry?
Two “Comments” by poets appearing in a 1945 “anthology of the war poetry of the 20th century”: Wallace Stevens and Muriel Rukeyser (“civilian poets”). While Stevens seems to be staying on a kind of broad…
Just what you need in a quarantine: Nada.
AUDIO LINK: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” For your edification and pleasure, I hope. Here is an audio recording of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Papa’s “existentialist” perspective is nowhere better on display…
Arts Interchange – This Little Mayberry: Will Johnson’s Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm
AUDIO LINK: This Little Mayberry: Will Johnson’s Hatteras Night Our show is “This Little Mayberry” and my guest is singer-songwriter and painter Will Johnson. Johnson might be best known as the lead singer of Centro-Matic…
Representative Texts from Hawthorne to Dickinson
In your daily busyness you are pressed for time to think and often choose instead anesthetization – watching any number of “boutique” and highly produced television shows. These may be good, but like most in…
LeRoi and Ornette – Becoming in Time
I was listening to a PoemTalk (PennSound) about LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) Jones’s early poem “Kenyatta Listening to Mozart” and one of the guests mentioned that Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come came out in…
On Allan Sekula: In the American Grain (WFHB’s Interchange)
AUDIO LINK: Shooting the Gulf: Allan Sekula In the American Grain In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases…
Dislodged Giant: Can We Use Stevens to Interpret Dickinson?
You tell me. “I thought that nature was enough” by Emily Dickinson I thought that nature was enough Till Human nature came But that the other did absorb As Parallax a Flame— Of Human nature…
A Rule of Storytelling and Unhappiness
As my friend began reading William Morris’s News From Nowhere, or, An Epic of Rest, I thought I might take that journey too–and the existence of an audio recording guaranteed it. (Plus, what a great…
Sierpinski Schmierpinski – On What the Writer Intends
The below is from the radio program “Bookworm” (4/11/96) with Michael Silverblatt. It is an interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest and this snippet focuses on the structure of the novel (and the…