How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here? —Lawrence Ferlinghetti I first read Seven Days…
for Sharifa Barakat Headache, the invalid feeling of being sickly and having to take it easy, testiness when things don’t go quite right, annoyance of magnetic gravity, things fall in a pile or slide off…
Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works Translated by Paul Schmidt And so I come back to the boy-genius, enfant terrible whose Illuminations I bought while at Bellarmine (under the influence of a Kerouac whose words I enjoyed…
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, editors, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School Rereading this collection after many years, I’m struck by the following perspectives from various writers I noted then and that still…
Over the years, I have been the blessed recipient of many poems by Katie Murphy, whose birthday it is today. I invite lovers of poetry to purchase her e-book, How to Live in Many Times…
More than a decade ago, octogenarian Jesuit felon Daniel Berrigan spoke at the local Jesuit university (in the auditorium of the business school, no less). During the Q & A, a friend of mine asked…
Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1984 Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing…
I first learned of Gary Snyder through Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, where he was fictionalized as “Japhy Ryder,” who, according to Alvah Goldbook [aka Allen Ginsberg], was “a great new hero of American…
I’ve read Anne Waldman since 2001 (Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays got me started). Her epics, poems, interviews, and edited anthologies (from the Kerouac School at Naropa) stimulate and open up possibilities. One of…
Jessie Sandova, From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal (Counterpoint Press, 2017) I had initial high hopes for reading the correspondence of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal. I started…