Tag Archives: Charles Bukowski

The Rough-Knuckled Life and Poetry of Charles Bukowski Born on This Day 99 Years Ago!

a song with no end when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric” I know what he meant I know what he wanted: to be completely alive every moment in spite of the inevitable. we can’t cheat death but we can make it work so hard that when it does take us it will have […]

Tom Crawford – R.I.P. – 1939-May 2018

How to Draw a Better Bird Resist eloquence. Get mad. If your bird is the snowy Clark’s Grebe, if that’s your bird, the one out there sitting on its eggs in a floating nest – stunning bird, serene bird – if that’s all you see, then it’s no good. You might just as well take […]

The Bigness of Small Poems – # 5 in a Series – Patrick Lane

The White Box In the white box you keep hidden away a white salamander waits with a flame in his small hands. How bright the fire! How long his breath has kept it alive. But the box is closed. Why do you keep it closed? Patrick Lane (1939 – ) from The Collected Poems of […]

Sit. Feast On Your Life; and Derek Walcott.

Were there a significant non-consumer surprise for each of us each and every Christmas, what a joy that might be! This Christmas I received a non-consumer surprise, not surprisingly, from a poem: Upstate by Derek Walcott, the West Indian 1992 Nobel  Prize Laureate, born in St. Lucia in 1930. Upstate,  published in the 1981 book […]