From a Recent Notebook
Of course, Diane di Prima is in My Canon… Because she honored Suzuki Roshi’s unprecedented presenceBecause she made the case for old-school being literally in touchBecause she gave primacy to cosmologyBecause I gifted C. with…
Search Results for: Kerouac
Jack and Allen
This website is indebted in a variety of ways to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from their one-liners such as “Be in love with yr life” (JK)…
June Journal 2019
Hanna Krall: “All my books are about how very good human beings can be, and about how very bad they can be—something we are constantly discovering over and over again.” Chasing the King of Hearts,…
Quit Complaining!
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shanTranslated and with an Introduction by Burton Watson I first learned of Han-shan 30 years ago when reading Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, which starred Japhy…
A Letter from Yael
Recently Yael asked me to share some favorite haiku writers, which I happily sent along, along with Yoel Hoffman’s book, Japanese Death Poems. I received the following response. 10/24/21 What a delight. Three big envelops all…
What I Love about the US of America: Overture to an Unfinishable List
Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Riverside Church, NYC, April 1967; Route 50 in Nevada; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train”; Joey Neilsen, resister of Catholic high school homophobia; massive…
Share the Wealth Sunday 6 June: The Joy of Letter-Writing
For this gathering I invite you to join me in sharing about our experiences of sending and receiving mail through the USPS. The idea for this Share came a few days ago from when Andrew…
Poets to (Re)Read
Sunday 4 February 2018 Justin I came up with this list of poets to become acquainted or reacquainted with, a few classic, several moderns, and many contemporaries. A good way to do this is fine …
Mentshes/5
Sign Up by Lindsey Trout Hughes Hi, Mark! I hope this note finds you well. I saw your post last week about the spring writing course. I asked Katie Consamus over coffee if she’d like…
Huzzah!/2
Make Lists Not War Dear Cami, One index of a profitable reading experience may very well be in the marginalia we make. For instance, I read Ed Sanders’ collection of poetry Let’s Not Keep Fighting…