Poet's Notebook
Poet’s Notebook: Jazz 2: The Hiromi – The Trio Project
The second trio is the Hiromi - The Trio Project led by the Japanese firecracker pianist/keyboardist Hiromi Uehara. Playing with her is the Sriracha hot percussionist Simon Philips and the brilliantly steady bass guitarist Anthony Jackson. Hiromi wrings intensity and...
Late Night Jazz
Late the other night, too early to sleep but not too early to be sleepy I GOOGLED Wayne Shorter and unwired a web world of jazz. Shorter's blowy throaty saxophone to be sure, but nothing short of much more. The 'more' included two groups new to me; one sprung from...
A Poet’s Notebook
What Poems Get Done Poems are the exploration of the common ground of human experience with the common ground of a language. Everyone has experiences throughout the day. Everyone uses language throughout the day. What most of us don’t do is look at our experiences...
Poet’s Notebook: Giacometti
I am reading a book on the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) in an attempt to rouse up my language. He knew things I want to know and expressed things I want to say. With immense vision and skill he used metal, plaster, paint, and clay to create gaunt...
A Poet’s Notebook
Alive in Language To write poetry is to be alive in language. To be alive in language means to live in awe of language, our most fundamental human accomplishment. To be alive in language is to be fascinated by language. Sight and sound, the seeing and hearing of...
Poet’s Notebook
Whatever happened to rhyme? Poems can no longer be defined as writing that rhymes. Since the 19th century with poet pioneers Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, rhyming has gone out of vogue. Nowadays few do. Most modern poems do not, at least not rhymes stuck neatly at...
Necessary Silence
A poem is sound pressed between two silences. A word cannot sound without the silence surrounding it. Without intermittent silence, speaking would be a mush of mumbling, nothing but indistinguishable sound. The same for the printed page, the empty spaces between words...
July 4th – Independence Day
America has gifted itself with a fundamental crisis. I say 'gifted' because every so often we need to realize how easy the dreams of our nation's founders can be lost. And we need to choose again who we as a nation want to be. The crisis has been long growing but in...
Thoughts & Prayers
After the Florida school shooting I almost sent out my thoughts & prayers. A l m o s t. Then, hearing the president & Paul Ryan speak I changed my mind. In this gun-crazed paranoid culture, my thoughts about guns don’t have a prayer.
Writers Conference September 30, 2017
On Saturday, September 30 the Lorain County Public Library System offered a writers conference at the North Ridgeville branch. I attended along with about eighty other local writers gathered to learn the strategies for getting published. The speaker was Chuck...
Art Is Not . . . Art Is
Art is not something to look at. Art is the act of seeing. Art is not something to look at. Art is a lesson on seeing. Art is not something to look at. Art breaks the looking glass so we can see past our reflection in the mirror.
Libraries
If all the words expressing all the thoughts contained in all the libraries of the world came pouring like noisy bangers out of bars into city streets shouting three cheers for thoughtful reflection, how much good would this riot of intelligence do? How much good has...
Walt Whitman’s American Dream
After reading Walt Whitman's great celebration of America, how can things go so wrong? After Song of Myself, how could we forget who we are and who we can be? Maybe we didn't read it. Maybe we need to read it again. A current slogan stirs the pot of political...
The Thrill of Phenomenology
Two words you seldom have seen together, ‘thrill’ and ‘phenomenology’. Perhaps the later word you’ve never seen at all. We will begin there. Phenomenology is a philosophical word. It begins with things as they are - - - wait for it - - - things as they are - - -...
The Double Bind
The double bind of our human nature; the more human we become the more unnatural we are. To date, our human enterprise has been to become less and less a part of and more and more apart from the natural world. Because of this, humanity suffers and the biosphere...
Old Things
I am old and I deserve the privilege of being around old things. Now most things around me are new. When I was a child I was surrounded old things. Our neighbor Mrs. Cedarholm was old. She lived in an old farm house on the edge of town. She was surrounded by old...
The Poetry of Politics
Yesterday morning, cold and wet and dark, I woke up in the unfinished stanza of the great poem called America. A new poet had taken over the manuscript: Donald J. Trump. His stanza was full of powerful words and imagery. It began on June 16, 2015 with an escalator...
Metaphor
Everything is what it is and also something else. It is the poet's work to articulate the intercourse between the 'is' and the 'else'.