Tag Archives: Poetry
Sun Ra Christmas 2016
Well it’s starting to feel like the year is really winding down as we’re swinging into the last days before Christmas. If you are travelling be safe. If you are staying put be grateful and generous. Thanks to everybody who reads these rants and comments and shares them. Every time we interact over these peculiar [...]
Buk Toons
For some reason the fall always seems like the most poetic season — the best season for writing and reading verse. I think it has something to do with darkness. I think it has something to do with the cold and the damp that begins to creep into the coming Southern winter. I think it [...]
Striking Slaves, Stinging Bees
You might not know it, but here in America we’re nearly one full month into a prison workers’ strike that began on September 9 on the anniversary of the Attica Uprising. I say you may not know it because the mainstream media doesn’t recognize detainees as human beings, and doesn’t think to illuminate the fact [...]
Kerouac Wax Stack
I love Open Culture’s treasure trove of free and accessible media. So many great things to find there. If you’re on Twitter you should follow OC @openculture. Every tweet is like opening a surprise and yesterday I discovered that all of Jack Kerouac’s recorded works are available for listening on the site through their curating [...]
Legend Falls
I was taken by surprise over the weekend by the news of the death of Jim Harrison. Harrison was a Michigan literary legend whose poetry and championing of the novella form won him wide, high praise. Harrison’s Legends of the Fall was his best known work, earning big screen treatment with a script by Harrison [...]
Bukowski: On Writing
I try to do all of my writing during the week. Songs I’ll write anytime. Poems anytime. But everything else gets pushed away at least once a week. It seems I’m always editing something or getting a blog post together by Sunday evening, but mostly, during the weekends, words are for reading. Nowadays that means [...]
Vintage John Lennon Cartoon
Recently, I was browsing through stories via Flipboard and I came across this delightful piece about a vintage animated short film based on John Lennon’s instantly recognizable cartoon doodles. Here’s a bit from the Brain Pickings site… …six years after the beloved Beatle’s assassination, Ono commissioned independent animator John Canemaker to create a short animated [...]
Yeats and the Faeries Yeats and the Faeries
Continuing our focus on National Poetry Month, here’s an interesting presentation about the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats and his preoccupations with the occult and the folk mythology of Ireland. R F Foster is a renowned Yeats expert. He’s the author of Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances. In this video Foster touches upon Yeats’s [...]
Lost Lion
Philip Levine, poet and son of Detroit, died on Valentine’s Day. He was an accomplished man who’d lived a long life, but anytime we lose a voice like his the silence it leaves behind is a roaring one. Levine’s poetry reached back to William Carlos Williams’ confrontations with the blunt facts of reality, and the [...]
A Sun Ra Christmas
Hope everybody is enjoying their holidays with friends and family, safe travels, delicious food and the surprises that the season might bring. Speaking of surprises, it seems that Sun Ra celebrated Christmas. Here’s another surprise — he broadcast his celebration on the radio. Here’s the skinny from Open Culture… Everybody spreads holiday cheer in their [...]
