We suffer, in this world, though it may seem absurd to say so, from an overabundance of supremely talented singer-songwriters. Yeah, I know—nice little problem to have. So many You Tube clips, so little time…

The downside of this decidedly First World problem likely falls most seriously on the supra-talented artists themselves. Most of them labor too long and deeply in relative obscurity, jostling for exposure, name recognition, gigs and income in all the ways artists have always struggled to continue answering the siren call of their art.

Answering it, of course, without wearing themselves out in day (or night) jobs driving cabs or giving music lessons to kids who are often resentfully there under the watchful eyes of parents dead-set on them developing their “artistic side.”

What he’s after is the essential truth over which a thousand theologies trip, stumbling over their dogmas, creeds and codes while...

Scientists have told us we share somewhere between 44-60% of our genes with fruit flies, 92% with mice and 98+% with chimpanzees. As for the 8 billion humans currently trodding the earth wearing skins identified as various shades of white, black, brown and more, speaking a dizzying array of languages with customs, clothes, mores and cultures vastly different from one another, the genetics tell a very different story than all those surface differences might suggest.

According to the National Human Genome Institute, “All human beings are 99.9% identical in their genetic makeup.” 

But oh, the woes and travails that 0.1% has visited upon us for the past couple of hundred thousand years!

These musings have come to mind repeatedly when reading the voluminous commentary on yet another heartless and brutal killing of a black man at the hands of police last week.

He’d rescued the mutt from the streets of Mexico, d...

Let’s face it: without hope and continual, sometimes rewarded longing for the world of love and beauty reflected in the faces of our mothers and her joyful cohorts from our first moments in the birth room, life would be a hard, hard slog. So much darkness, so much beauty.

It’s as if two exhausted boxers in the 35th round of a fight to the death keep probing and hoping for the merest, minuscule suggestion of acquiescence in the other so the question can be settled once and for all.

Polish poet Adam Zagajewski knew that slugfest well, beginning from his own birth in the city of Lwów, Poland, in June 1945. When he was barely four months old, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union annexed Lwów in the carve-up by the Allied powers as World War II ended, placing Lwów into the newly founded Soviet Republic of Ukraine.

Stalin sent Zagajewski’s engineer father and family of four packing along with countless other professi...

Hymns and anthems don’t generally make for great poetry of the kind we are accustomed to from poetically inclined songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Cole Porter, et al. (When you’re done here, click on this for a fun discussion on NPR of “10 Nobel-Worthy Lyricists Who Aren’t Bob Dylan.”)

The churchy and/or patriotically laden lyrics of hymns and anthems usually get too flabby with arcane devotional language and banal nature references stripped of any surprise imagery, intriguing word combinations or fresh metaphors that make good poetry shine.

So I will begin the 35th rendition of this “Brilliant Songs” series with the caveat that “Hawai’i Aloha” is not per se a brilliant set of lyrics worthy of a place in some Songwriters Hall of Fame, which I didn’t know existed until I looked it up just now.  (It’s in Nashville...

British writer Robert Graves came terribly close to joining the 9.7 million other soldiers who died in World War I when his body was tossed among mounds of corpses after it was evacuated from the battlefield and he was listed as officially dead, with notices sent to British newspapers and his family. A shell fragment had shot through his lungs at the Battle of the Somme in France. It was 1916, and he was 21 years old.

Graves went on to live another 69 years after almost literally coming back from the dead, and along the way he established himself as one of the leading figures in 20th century literature, with a prodigious output spanning the worlds of poetry, fiction, short stories and memoir.

He quit writing in his final dozen years only because Alzheimer’s disease descended upon him, robbing him, finally, of all memory.

He had been a deeply learned man, steeped in mythology, father of eight children from ...