• Poetry

    Decay and Renewal: An Analysis of
    Walt Whitman’s “This Compost”

    November 13, 2015 - By 

    Some 16 months ago (about 60 posts in BlogTime), I feautured Robert Ingersoll’s eulogy of Walt Whitman, with a brief commentary indicating I would return to Whitman’s work, it being the inexhaustible centerpiece of American poetry that it is. So, following the advice of reader Robby Miller at that time that I keep a copy of Leaves of Grass always handy and open it at random moments to a random page and read for a spell, I did just that the other night and landed on “This Compost.” Such an ecological theme for these times, yes? Conjuring images of all…

  • Personal Reflections

    “I Contain Multitudes”: Carrying on Through Darkness and Light

    December 12, 2014 - By 

    Forty-five years ago today, I got a “Dear John” letter from my high school heartthrob who had gone away to college. It was my first major heartbreak (there would be others), and as I collapsed onto my bed sobbing while beholding my girlfriend’s sincere but crushing words, my mom hurried into my room and proceeded to pull me close to her as I wept onto her shoulder for a good long while. Ah, me… I have always remembered the date because it was one I had marked on my internal calendar many months before. My junior college basketball team was…

  • Media - Personal Reflections

    Age of Vanity:
    Ali, Whitman, Facebook & Us

    October 19, 2013 - By 

    Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. —Ecclesiastes1 I was a fight fan in my youth. On Friday nights, my dad would pop home after his arduous work week with a quart or two of Eastside Old Tap Lager in hand—or when he was feeling flush, the slightly pricier Miller High Life—and we’d tune into the Friday Night Fights hosted by Don Dunphy, whose voice remains permanently etched in my memory. (Exactly where, is what I want to know, and how does memory encode itself into my brain matter to so clearly remember a voice?)…