Currently viewing the tag: "Poetry"
While visiting York College of Pennsylvania to give a reading, Marion took the time to sit down with me and answer some questions. In a closet. I’m kidding, of course, but only barely. The room in which we seated ourselves is not only window-less, but quite small–calling it cozy would be a rather generous [...]
“Evil has become a product of manufacture, it is built into our whole industrial and political system, it is being manufactured every day, it is rolling off the assembly line, it is being sold in the stores, it pollutes the air… Perhaps the way to cope with the adversary is to confront him [...]
For me, the experience of poetry has most often been a painful one. Reading poetry is usually like trying to catch a butterfly—I’m running and leaping and stretching with all I have, trying to get that damn butterfly, but it always remains just out of my grasp. There are some poets with whom I [...]
Mother as a young leftist
Sang: O I can boil eggs in a pot and
Fry them in butter for lunch
Three little comrades heating in my tummy
They wanted their turn to wear striped pants
and grow ponytails, croon harmonicas
and agitate tambourines, thousands
of them trying to make the Sixties last longer
by floating in a sea of hair and bare shoulders
Looking like Jesus in curls
Jesus on blow in tinted glasses
he sidles up next to me
at the Kohler & Campbell spinet
that separates us from the dining room
where his sisters set the table as if it’s art
candied yams and cranberries
candles lit atop the fine holiday cloth’s
stitched pattern of autumn leaves
a Bible open to chapter and verse
to read aloud before the meal.
O the difference
between dialogue and harmony—
how I understood
in one blue moment
to give myself to water
In light of National Poetry month, shaking like a mountain will run a series of new poems this week starting tomorrow with Simmon Buntin’s “Desert Jazz.”
Yeah, so we all get born, we die,
the nights are dark between
the two. So what. The room
is dimly lit and I’m no expert on the blues,
white girl sitting here cozy dreaming
of her own gone dad, but hey—
we all pass this way, nights now
This past Saturday night, fifty-plus hearty spirits crowded the Mediator Fellowship Hall in Providence, RI, braving the churlish end-of-February weather for a night of shiny music, shimmering poetry and shaking prose. It was shaking’s maiden voyage public-wise, a shakingdown cruise so to speak. Everyone survived. Yea, I dare say even flourished__ to the delight of the writers and presenters (Jericho Brown, Marita Andrade, Jo-Ann Reid, R.A. Stovetop Lawson, Liz Carter, Scott Duhamel and shaking editor Mr. Don), and a trio of fine singer/ songwriters (Mark Cutler, Chris Monti and Anthony Loffredio).The next one’s already on the drawing table; check these pages for announcements of more shaking evenings to come.
