Asking the Unasked Question About Gay Teen Suicide

Asking the Unasked Question About Gay Teen Suicide Elliott batTzedek On Coming Out Day, October 11, 1987, I was supposed to be in DC. Instead, I’d stayed in Madison, WI, and agreed to have my parents come for an awkward, difficult visit, spilling over with things not said. That Sunday morning, after they’d left on [...]

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Timely Lyrics Wednesday

It’s one of THOSE days at work, and I found myself humming this Roches’ classic: The Death of Suzzy Roche I work in the laundromat The one that Suzzy Roche Does hers at I hate her guts She thinks I want her autograph She’s got stinky crusty socks She’s got underwear that shocks O what [...]

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pre-poem research – The Bushel

All writers do research. Always. Sometimes it is called “daydreaming,” but it is still research. Sometimes it is browsing, a word adopted by websters and heightened by the invention of google and wikipedia into an art form. Today I need to know about pecks and bushels. How much is a peck? How much peck could [...]

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on the back of the envelope

I found this list, in my handwriting but a mystery to me: gesture sarcasm etymology The Roches opposable thumbs brains and minds Maps Afghani Wikipedia Rough

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Mark Twain’s 19 Rules Governing Literary Art

From Twain’s brutally funny essay on Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses in the Deerslayer series. I thought of this essay on Saturday at the Brandywine River Museum, standing in front of one of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for Deerslayer. Here’s the beginning of the essay; I’ll put the link to the whole piece at the bottom. It [...]

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a greater variety of poetry than what gathers in the schools?

Annie Get Your Gun Fifth in a series of eight manifestos. by D.A. Powell The thing about sardines when you buy them in a can: they are fairly uniform in size and in flavor; their individual identities have disappeared into the general fishiness of the soybean oil; their little bones have melted; their flesh has [...]

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On not taking scholarship too seriously….

from The Art of Biblical Poetry by Robert Alter “In the 1930s, an Orientalist, Paul Kraus, set out to show that the entire Hebrew Bible, once properly accented, could be demonstrated to have been written in verse. When he discovered two-thirds of the way through his analysis that the texts no longer bore out his [...]

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