I’ve long agreed with Winston Churchill’s assessment that democracy was the worst form of government with the possible exception of all the rest. Democracy, at the very least, allows you to throw the bums out, and so it has. It’s been at least two years since anything really good has taken place in our […]
(I’ve often thought in recent years that I could write political speeches, but I’ve never tried til now. What would I say if I was on the stump at this moment, a month before the mid-terms, and I only had a few minutes to say it?) Our situation is desperate. Our utterly corrupt president is […]
I’ve always been interested in artistic process and accounts of how certain works came to life. On a furiously windy day a couple years ago in Boulder–I believe it was April–Xcel Energy cut the power to a lot of neighborhoods, no doubt trying to avoid what had happened with the Marshall fire that burned […]
It’s been a hundred years since Allen Ginsberg’s birth (1926-1997) in New Jersey. I worked as one of his secretaries in the 1980s. A principle task I had was to type his hand-written journals, including his poems. I particularly liked at the time “Eroica,” and later told him that (published in Plutonian Ode, 1982). He […]
It’s like being trapped in a bad movie that just keeps getting worse, but you’re locked in the theater for forced viewing. Hence out of desperation and/or addiction, I’m locked into trying to make sense out of what’s taking place in America. Based on my slack-jawed observation, apparently Republicans have come to believe the following: […]
Some of those at work forces Are the same that burn crosses –Rage Against the Machine, “Killing in the Name” I was having dinner with my friend Joe the other night at Sherpa’s, a Nepalese restaurant in Boulder. It’s in a big old house on Walnut. Conversation turned inevitably to the Trump administration, and […]
I haven’t posted here in a long time primarily because I’ve been trying to finish this book-length poem, I’ll Begin in the Middle, that I’ve been writing for the past year plus. That’s eaten all my literary time and disposable mental bandwidth. Meanwhile, I have continued to drink my daily cup of poison that is […]
In the mid-80s I worked as an orderly in a Boulder nursing home. I became friends with another orderly (Jewish, gay, and Republican) I shared the graveyard shift with. We had a lot of interesting conversations in the middle of the night. Once I asked him what he was reading then. “A lot of books […]
Hollywood has treated us to a regular stream of comic book movies wherein the hero/heroine/heroes (&LGBTQetc.) save America, or, more often, the entire planet from malevolent actors, homegrown or from outer space…and we sure could use a hero right about now to save us from ourselves. I vote for Wonder Woman, particularly because of her […]
I’ve been writing this long poem (80 plus pages as of this date) about poets and poetry (and anything else that crosses my mind). It’s returned my attention to creating art, the process of it, and what that is or isn’t. While this historical moment has largely obviated any centrality in the greater social consciousness […]
