In The Poetry

Here’s another homage to another poet. It’s called ‘Crepuscule with Muriel’. Muriel is, of course, Muriel Rukeyser. Muriel Rukeyser had a severe stroke fairly early in her life, which is to say in her fifties, and taught herself again to talk, to walk, to write and wrote about that. And the title of course is [...]

The Old Reliable is a bar that was then on East 3rd Street between Avenue B and C, and it’s a bar that I frequented with various friends at that time. And this is a poem that was written some twenty years later about those days and it’s dedicated to Lewis Ellingham who now lives [...]

This is called ‘Morning News’ and it was written just about the time of the American pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Morning News

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a [...]

June Jordan – just a couple of years before she died – wrote a memoir of her childhood which was called Soldier, and that was what her Dad used to call her, “little soldier”.

Elegy for a Soldier

I.

The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in [...]