Category: Writing
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Vulnerare
In the Christmas Carols are the covered truths About the battered beauties who then love Despite the signs, the signaled fears That cue our cowing, that create our fights And fletch our flights with the feathers of something That kidnaps our courage. They execute a Plan as if plotting, as if placing a mole Merrymaking…
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Pigeons and Turtledoves
Watch and the world withers before you As you sit and sip. Seats on the peaks Of stool stumps rock. Staying on wheels Lateral that lean? Like we are just sliding Towards the wakes? Towards the streets And their dangerous drakes? Dream about biding Time and the tide. Teach the childer How racist we aren’t.…
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To Jack Across the Sea
We two met in the one Irish New York pub known and still run by Eires like you. Our talking it turned up tragic: tuition, writers from the thirties rotting. These comic thoughts, these ideas interrupted the oral momentum: translucent roofs true to Spiderman, blurred and iron // blank and fragile— clichés are the things…
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Letters to a Young Poet …via Email
The following letters to a young poet grew out of emails sent to a poet. He had recently sent me a three-stanza poem asking for critique. I also, by the end, quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: ••• [Young Poet,] There are some really, really good lines in here and obviously the subject matter is hard…
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This Jodi Picoult Book VS. Writing Rules, Revised
Thanks to you guys, my new book is dominating that Jodi Picoult book: Of course, it probably won’t stay above the Jodi Picoult book and Pierce Brown’s work for long. Maybe it has disappeared into the void already. Regardless, it’s always nice to know you guys have my back. Us verses the literary world, guys. Actually,…
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Kindle Faults :: 10 Things My Kindle Can’t Do
There are 10 things my Kindle can’t do. These Kindle faults show the power of preferring a standard paperback: Exist without a Power Source – Unfortunately, somebody bought out Nicolae Tesla’s patents. As is, we have no Tesla Coils to transmit electricity to our Kindle through midair. I’ve had two separate occasions where I ran out…
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Gloria in Profundis by G.K. Chesterton
In keeping with our annual tradition — Christmas readings of the best Christmas stories — here’s a poem by G.K. Chesterton entitled Gloria in Profundis. It’s a poem about how the fall of God is greater than the fall of man: If you’d like to hear more of the best Christmas stories, click here. cover…
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Mother of Exiles
Eight-hundred. Their open mouths Similarly sing songs we all know Though know not: their tongues — they show No face cards. Nimble, demure, go ghosts Of the Mind of God, mad sod made sad, Triangle eyelids, squares and trundle sides, But they’re still eyes, you know. Stopping together They see as one. Smell as one though…
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Guantanamera
You sing it. Yourn — they mourn, they Wring it over, ragdolls and wine, Listening somber, listening longer Than anyone else in the “N” train’s crowd. Others ignore you, mothers note the Boredom born in baby faces. Teens spend their braincells as tender On turn-based games in their tiny screens. You sing it. Yourn — they mourn,…
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Artistic Resistance :: Reflections
IN Aids to Reflection, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says the following (he often enjoyed employing the use of all-caps): READER!—You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which…
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To Della Beyond the Veil
You yearned for your homeland. Always do. After the era passes you, you pass too. Music styles wane as moons, Norwood’s fiddle when new knew you, knew grandkids too, never me though or the little themes that we know, millennials make do. My how the strings request of me: “Play.” Can resonance reach across a…
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Uncon 2016: Author in Progress
We were never meant to go it alone and yet somehow the bad myth of the lone wolf artist persists. It shows up in the isolated anxiety attacks of writers preparing for their pitch slams at a massive conference, in the loneliness of presentations, in the alienation of large group lectures, and in the all-business-no-play…