• Poetry

    On Losing Stuff. And Loss.
    And Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

    May 18, 2017 - By 

    How much time might you have spent in the past, oh, month, looking for items you misplaced? The keys, the glasses, the purse, the shirt, the notes, the credit card you removed from the wallet to make a purchase, online or in the store, suddenly gone. (Lucky for you if the checker or bagger chased you out to the parking lot, smiling, bless their heart, your card held aloft in their hands in the kindest possible reproach.) With your misplacements at home, you begin flipping over the dish towels, the junk mail, the pillows and post-its and papers and gadgets. Minutes…

  • Music - Poetry

    The Best Anti-War Song Ever

    May 25, 2014 - By 

    The best anti-war song ever written actually began its life as a poem. But like most fine poems, it contained an abundance of musical elements and concrete, vivid imagery. So much so that folk singer John Gorka readily saw the opportunity to turn it into a haunting, masterful song, so plaintive and quietly anguished that it throws off the power of its anti-war outrage under the cloak of a mother’s muffled sobs. “Let them in, Peter,” implores the first line, and we immediately know which “Peter” the poet Elma Dean was referring to in the dark days of 1942, when…