Is Starbucks Harboring a Secret Pulitzer-Worthy Poetry Stash?
Either Starbucks has the dirt on Pulitzer Prize Winner Philip Levine and they are secretly blackmailing him, or....Oh, nevermind. Starbucks is evil. Do you need room for cream?
the real enemy
Bush commutes Libby's sentence and spits in the face of everyday Americans. As ever, poetry responds.
Godjilla in New Orleans
Godjilla is in New Orleans doing whatever she can to help. Here's a picture she took and a poem by Martha Serpas.
Poetry and profanity....
I ask you, is there anything more human?
Sad Little Breathing Machine
This New Year's I made two resolutions: to not make any resolutions, and to write here with regularity. With this entry I'm at least keeping one, and I'd like to start the new year off with a recommendation: Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey.
"Let America be America again."
O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe. -- Langston Hughes
Freedom's Sad State: America
Although America has never come close to living up to its ideals, its authority in the world has depended in large part on its projected moral authority. Now that the Bush Administration is bent on disolving what's left, how should we respond?
Remembering Katrina
"Some days all that can be done / is to salvage one sadness from the mass / of sadnesses." - Thomas Lynch
Over coffee and oranges, two poems on a Sunday morning
"And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know?" - Wallace Stevens, from "Sunday Morning"
College for Bards
KU classes start and at the grocery store I heard this girl talking about cleaning the puke out of her bed. I'll allow W.H. Auden to respond.
When Poets Overthrow the Government
Genocide, terrror, torture. Maybe it just boils down to this:"We do this, they do that. / Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand / (10,000) brutal, beautiful years."-Thomas Lux, from "The People of the Other Village"
"Death is the mother of beauty" - huh?
A few stray paragraphs on some first encounters with poetry.
Independence Day
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has written another excellent and frightening article on the Bush Administration's plans for war with Iran. Also, an apropos Auden poem.
The Cult of the Poet
What does it take to be a poet? How do you perceive poets? How would you define "poet"?
Monday Workshop & Exercise
Well, it's officially Summer and after a brief hiatus from "Tallow & Glue," I'm back with another weekly poetry exercise.
"Never again," so say we all...again and again and again.
In Darfur: 400,000 dead, 3.5 million displaced people.What do we do with all of this? Poetry provides one answer.
Monday Workshop Thread & Exercise: Trash Poems
"The dump is full / of images."Write about trash.
Monday Workshop Thread & Exercise
Good writing comes from being where you are, not from some idea of a Future You in a commune in Tibet with all the time in the world. In reality and in the Present, poems come from being stuck in a broken Subaru on Clinton Parkway with no change for the bus.
"Come and see..."
Today is the 69th anniversary of the day German planes bombed the city of Guernica, Spain, in the Basque part of the country. Could it happen again? It has.
Monday Workshop Thread & Exercise on Tuesday
Better late than never. Here's a way to start writing about all those things you wish you had time to write about.
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