Alex Chilton is dead

there goes the last vestige of my M'phis youth . . .

I shall write no more
poems of the flat
declarative statement.
Starting now.
It’ll be great.
I promise.

if you use blogger, are you ever tempted to punch the button that says "monetize"? i mean, it's just a button - all you have to do is push it. and you're monetized. everybody's getting monetized. why not??

Inexpert, I
notice with the attention
and drifting inattention
of poetry

- Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave

A.) “People willingly believe what they want to believe.”

- Julius Caesar, The Gallic War

B.) "There's a sucker born every minute."

- attrib. P.T. Barnum

C.) "The customer's always right."

- American saying

D.) "The fool sees not the same tree that he wise man sees."

- Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

E.)  "A word, to the wise, is sufficient."

- trad. saying; attribution unknown

E.) ". . . silence, cunning, and exile."

- Joyce, Portait of the Artist

Can we do anything with social ills besides descry and decry them? Or engage in senseless individual acts of violence?

What is the ethical obligation (if any) of doctoral programs to educate the applicants they have admitted about the rapid deterioration of the academic job market?

So what would it take for people - working people with families - to rebel? 

I'm sure a lot of elegies, eulogies, and encomiums are being written for Lucille Clifton right about now. And I'm sure I don't have much to add. Clifton's poetry was pretty important to me about 20 years ago, but, regrettably, I hadn't read much of her stuff since then. When I heard of her passing tonight, I went back and read some of her poems - aloud, which is, I think, how they ought to be read. What an ear! Both the aural music and the emotional pitch are dead-on. The much-anthologized "reply" is a brilliant response to those who see "documentary poetry" as being crudely mimetic. And it's pretty amazing that a twentieth-century poet could pull off a soliloquy of Lucifer to God (in "brothers"):

come coil with me
here in creation's bed
among the twigs and ribbons
of the past. i have grown old
remembering this garden,
the hum of the great cats
moving into language, the sweet
fume of the man's rib
as it rose up and began to walk.

These lines contain rather more high seriousness than most of the lyric verse I read these days, which makes it all the more remarkable that it binds my attention as it does.

My dad is 83 tomorrow. Lucille, you were robbed. So were we.

" . . . silence, cunning and exile."