O Luxury by Guy Longchamps O what a luxury it be how exquisite, what perfect bliss so ordinary and yet chic to pee to piss to take a leak To feel your bladder just go free and open like the Mighty Miss and all your cares go down the creek to pee […]
MoreFifty-four years ago today the world gained a joyful citizen, the radiant Elizabeth Ann O’Leary. Unfortunately for the world and for all of us who loved Beth, she moved on ten years ago, just shy of her 44 birthday. A few weeks ago on the tenth anniversary of her death, I visited her grave […]
MoreContinuing with my previous post, here’s three more poems I left behind on a recent trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. Louise Gluck’s riveting “Gretel in Darkness” is a favorite poem of mine and I couldn’t resist putting it in these enchanted woods. Gluck imagines Gretel years after she has pushed […]
MoreEvery summer for the past seven I’ve made a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Year after year, its wild beauty calls me back. (You can read about my 2010 visit here.) Visiting the U.P. unsettles me. I’m enough a suburbanite that I feel on edge in a place with so many trees and so […]
MoreComposed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like […]
MoreIn last Sunday’s New York Times former science reporter John Schwartz wrote an op-ed piece about the eerie accuracy of novels in predicting the future. I can’t make any such claims for poetry–-not least because the scope of my poetry reading is so small and for all I know there exists a tradition of science […]
MoreAfter the Children Leave Home by Maria Mazziotti Gillan Slowly, we settle into the quiet house. We almost grow accustomed to the noise of absence, that terrible stillness that slides along carpeted surfaces. “The house is so quiet without them,” you say, your voice husky […]
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