Hold It All

Hold it all The sun blasting away and the clouds offering respite June 1968 and July 1988 The nights I used to work at the Bristol Bar and Grill and the mornings Sara Wall worked…

On Ferlinghetti’s Americus, I

For Dianne Lee and Lynette D’Amico When I first read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Americus,I just before The Book of Mev was published, I was energized by discovering how much it is a mish mash, full of…

Reading/Writing/Seeing

for Emily, Kelley, and Lindsay 1. In reality every reader is, while she is reading, the reader of her own self.  The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to…

A Lifetime of Letters

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008) I have a file titled “Noam Chomsky” that contains several letters from the linguist during the 1990s. I first began writing him…