Consciousness. “I think that I am here, on this earth, / To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know,” wrote the poet Czeslaw Milosz late in life. “As if I were sent so that whatever takes place / Has meaning because it changes into memory.”
Milosz’ poem came to mind recently when news broke that Lala and Tom’s beautiful ambling old bernese mountain dog, Tallulah, had died. Several evenings later, over drinks and condolences in our kitchen, LaLa asked rhetorically: Do you think we’ll go to heaven with our dogs?
Implicit in LaLa’s question is the assumption that ...
Reading Tom Poland’s fascinating account of his relationship with the author of Deliverance, I was moved to revisit James Dickey the poet, and to wonder what the hell-blaze of war consumed in him, and what it tempered into artistic resolve.
Has any poet better depicted the soul-stripping terror of modern technological warfare than Dickey has done in The Firebombing? This mesmerizing, 1700-word poem leads off Buckdancer’s Choice, the 1964 collection that earned the National Book Award.
The poet here is a night-fighter pilot, at home, 20 years into the suburbs, eating figs in his "half-paid-for" pantry, lost from his daily life – ...
“A great Irish chieftain has passed.” That line from Niall O’Dowd of Irish Central, is my favorite of the recent salutes to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
Chieftain implies courage, passion, ferocity in the face of poor odds. Great victories and breast-beating cries for forgiveness on a grand stage. Ribaldry and tenderness in extremis. Theatricality with brains, as Doug Cumming said of the late Bill Emerson.
So it was no surprise that a dying U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote a letter to Pope Benedict. He exercised a privilege well earned. What was sad, even a little heartbreaking, was that he did ...
Back when earth was “the great neighborhood of Creation,” Adam and Eve had it easy, thinking and acting locally, answers to every need close at hand. Then they had children who grew up to be Copernicus, Adam Smith, Tom Friedman ….
Now our speck of a world is flat, hot and crowded. Poverty and cruelty threaten every celebrated spike of prosperity. Global “solutions” extinguish entire species – local economies, human cultures and ways of life, included.
What to do? Well, cup a hand to your ear and listen for the un-amplified voices of children who grew up to be poets and artists, ...
Look here. You can forget a thing and then recall it. Miss a turn and go back to it. Lose your mind and have fun finding it. Memory is everything. What would our imaginations be without facts to stretch and feelings to re-experience?
Now Dutch scientists have proven that our memory-making enterprise starts up in earnest while we’re still in the womb, responding to sounds, voices and attitudes. This is big news. Forever the preacher’s kid, the first thing I thought was, “So that’s why I know the Baptist hymnal forwards and backwards!” Followed closely by, “But if that’s the case, ...
"God Bless America." We’ve made it our national hymn and we force our elected officials to recite the words from every podium, on every occasion, every time, else have their patriotism challenged.
Patriotism? Where along the way did our nation of immigrants – our masses of indebted, desperate and persecuted ancestors – acquire the belief that the USA’s great wealth is a blessing from God? Which if true would mean, ipso facto, that those who suffer must be fallen from grace? Hmm. Our Country ’Tis of Thee, and as for unbelievers, Let the Heathen Rage.
Pope Benedict’s encyclical this week on ...
His name is legion in the United States of America’s great family album – the veteran who serves youthful years in horrific danger in a distant war, then comes home and never has much to say about it. Unless calling up memories that make us laugh with him.
Walter Boone Lucas was such a fellow. With smiling self-deprecation, he would tell of being drafted in Baltimore in 1942, marching on the boardwalk in Atlantic City (hasty mustering of fresh troops) with a broom handle (rifle shortage), in boots too big (no size 6.5 available), then training as a radio technician at ...
Wait a minute. I want Michael Jackson to have his due. My wife and I and one of our children saw him perform at Atlanta stadium in the early 1980s. Phenomenal.
But what are we to think when Al Sharpton goes before the cameras to say Michael was the first African-American with a global impact? On "Hardball," Chris Matthews gracefully reminded him about Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali.
Or what about every street celebrant declaring that Michael’s greatest accomplishment was getting whites and blacks listening to the same music? That’s a good chuckle up in heaven’s music halls for Louis Armstrong, ...
Sure, the Irish continue to save civilization. Fight, make love, write poetry. Talk about these things over pints. Tell redeeming stories.
If you haven’t met Henry Smart, a street kid who rises out of Dublin’s sewers (literally) to enliven the hapless Irish Citizens Army in the 1916 Easter Rising, I urge you to track him down and introduce yourself. You’ll find him in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, a novel of great rollicking excess and unforgettable characters.
It’s a wild ride of killing, betrayal and passion. The good news is that Henry suffers no unrequited love. His “Maud Gonne” – no ...
Keith Graham’s excellent reflection on the military draft and a broader concept of mandated service is a comfortable context for a wonderfully ironic little poem by the late William Stafford, a conscientious objector who served the WWII years in government work camps.
At the Un-National Monument
Along the Canadian Border
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed – ...
Emily Dickinson’s dictum “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” is wise counsel for writers sidling into the thickets of politics and religion. “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind.”
Well, Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry would sooner strike us sightless – knock us off our asses like Saul on the road to Damascus – to stop the heedless plundering of the earth.
It is the destruction of the world
In our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
We have so ravaged the path ...
All things seen are real, said Walt Whitman, and in that spirit three decades ago, the Academy of American Poets presented the annual Walt Whitman Award to the writer of a book-length collection of poems, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.
Today, the author of that collection and its improbable title poem – David Bottoms of Canton – is Georgia’s Poet Laureate, professor of creative writing and poetry at Georgia State University, and author of other highly regarded volumes, including Vagrant Grace, Armored Hearts, Easter Weekend and Under the Vulture-Tree. He is also founding coeditor of the literary publication Five ...
Remember the Alamo? I do. As a boy, I went to the dentist in a building across from the Alamo. While the dentist did repairs, I floated on laughing gas wondering why Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie had to die. (Or later on, whether Cherry, the girl who lived across the street from me, would leave her blinds open again that night).
At Alamo Heights High School, I learned that men from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, the Carolinas, etc. etc. (in other words, the United States of America), crossed the Red River to fight and die for those Irish-Scots-German immigrants who settled ...
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