H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.
Jack Wolford: The Resurrection of Jack Wolford
(Being an anonymous manuscript that arrived in the mail)
Woody Lewis: ‘A Stranger Comes To Town’, a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Lynne Sharon Schwartz begins her new novel, A Stranger Comes To Town, with Tolstoy’s maxim about plot: “All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
Chana Bloch: Beaux Arts
They knew something about pleasure, too,
those painters—how well they understood
it may be compounded
of the simplest elements, the merest trace
of water or light.
George Yancy: A New Era of Scholarship Is Shining a Light on the Black Philosophical Tradition
Without this history, students may see Black thinkers as footnotes rather than world-historical contributors.
William Palmer | The Glow Fills Something Inside: Lucille Clifton and Alma
among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names
Bob Kunzinger: K.P. Davis and the Strength of Women
In a world of a million voices reeling at the same time for space, for the slightest increase of volume, these women wake us up with their whispering determination.
George Yancy: Black Men Endured Sexual Exploitation Under Slavery. Their Story Is Rarely Told.
There were no legal protections against the rape of enslaved Black women or enslaved Black men.
Mike Vargo: Language Is a Virus
A punishment for the arrogance of thinking my mission in life was to explain things to people.
Octavia E. Butler: A Few Rules For Predicting The Future
‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’
Jerome Bergland: The Dreaminations of Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng long ago established himself as one of the most thrilling and gifted writers of haibun and tanka prose.
Cynthia Atkins: When Harry Met Sally
A light quaked on earth, because when the waitress
gasped and blushed, we gasped and blushed,
sitting in the plush dark aisles to our interiors.
Michael T. Young | The Secular Sublime: An Appreciation of Gerald Stern
Stern’s poems are deceptively simple. He writes in a language completely devoid of pretense and yet dignified with the elegance of profound meditation.
Richard St. John: Death of the Tragedians
He was torn apart by dogs
set loose by playwrights, jealous that the gods
gave him more talent
