Part of drafting a poem is reading it aloud. Until its been read, it remains unfinished. * Midway through reading a poem I liked, I realized it was too long. I felt different about it as it was coming out of my mouth. Wrong room perhaps? Different kind of listeners? This morning I took that …
Mary Lou Williams
“No one can put a style on me. I've learned from many people. I change all the time. I experiment to keep up with what is going on, to hear what everybody else is doing. I even keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what will happen next.” —Mary Lou Williams …
Black History As A Living Document
This is the third blog I've had in about 20 years. With those first two, every February I'd challenge myself to write a biography or history one day for a month. It could be a fun exercise as a writer, especially when I'd get a day or so ahead of myself, and could post and …
Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden was one of the first poets whose work I was introduced to. Back in college, I wrote a paper on his poem, Those Winter Sundays. The Poem hit me close to home because one of the things it does successfully is underscore the tension between father and son, which I was experiencing a …
The End Of Our Elaborate Plans
WHEREIN THE AUTHOR GETS LAID OFF WITHOUT GETTING LAID/ AND SCREAMS I BEEN IN THIS PRISON FIFTEEN YEARS Two days left before the office shuts down for good. After 80 years the firm where I work will be shuddered and left to history, though no one in the future will look back on this place …
The Twelve Days Of Clinics
*WHEREIN THE AUTHOR WORKS OUT HIS TRUE FEELINGS ON CHRISTMAS **WITH THANX TO THE OTHER JIM ***SET TO THE TUNE OF ... OH, YOU KNOW On the First Day of Clinics My True Love Gave To Me Chronic Hepatitis C On the Second Day of Clinics My True Love Gave To Me Genital Warts And …
Mouth Of The City
Though I hate Saturday night readings, I agreed, mostly because my friend T was also asked to appear and she would drive me there and back. She texted me that she was picking up one other guest who lived near me but she would come get me first. I packed several poems in a business …
The Saturday A Song Saved My So-Called Life or The Nappy Virgin
IN WHICH TEEN ENVY FROM THE MID 80'S SET MY SUMMER AFLAME SENDING ME ON A PATH OF SELF DESTRUCTION... HOW HAIR CAN KILL... HOW SOMETIMES THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE YOU IS A MUSIC VIDEO... HOW HAIRSTYLES CAN SEPARATE FAMILIES... HOW NEW NOMINEES FOR THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME CAN BE …
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Working With White Noise or What It Means As A Performer To Have Social Anxiety
My friend and I met as if on cue at the convergence of the taco trucks. He attends Fridays at the Oakland Museum regularly on his way home from work and agreed to meet when I told him about the poetry reading. We made a brief lap through the modest community of neighbors here at …
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Shaken
Seizure: being grabbed and tossed to the ground. In an instant, I became a bucking horse, forgiven everything except this moment. In exchange for a mouthful of blackened bacon sweating grease, here is a chaser of carpet and the hail of a table's debris. It is unusual, to say the least, to awaken face down on a carpet, …
