“21 janises” ZJC (2010)
I could listen to Janis all day long. Her backup band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, though, never pleases. This video is a good example. The first 3 minutes and 20 seconds of the folktune Coo Coo don’t even have her singing. Some unwashed hippie with no vocal range sings with […]
A friend and collaborator on many artistic projects, Shelley M. House is one of the finest graphic artists I know. Her mastery of the human body in simple line drawings creates complex anatomy studies and her use of color is breathtaking.
Recently I discovered that one of my poems, Cello, will appear next to her Hibiscus […]
Of the several story arcs I have been working on over the last couple of years The Himeyuri (ひめゆり学徒隊) sometimes called The Lily Corps in English, has been kept my attention for a very long time. The Himeyuri were a group of female high school students formed into a nursing unit for the Imperial Japanese […]
“men at buchenwald, moments before execution” ZJC (2008)
As anyone on the outside will tell you, Sartre was dead-on when he said, L’enfer, c’est les autres, Hell is other people. We are all born to be heroes, we are all born divine, it is only those you meet growing up, those you pass on the street, […]
The Baltimore Sun just posted this. I am sad to report the poet Lucille Clifton has just passed away. Her book Blessing the Boats is one of the best collections of poetry that has come out in the last 50 years. I saw her perform several times at the Dodge Poetry Festival and heard her […]