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SONGS AGAINST SONGS
The band Love As we fill up the Final Four, we have 2 more spaces and 2 more brackets remaining. Winfield Scott Bracket. “The Good Life” performed by Nancy Wilson. A hit for Tony Bennett, we prefer...
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NOW WE HAVE OUR FINAL FOUR
Composer and singer of “Surabaya Johnny” John Towsend Trowbridge Bracket adds the last corner of our Final Four! We’ve got Shaman’s Blues by the Doors, representing the Dorothy Gilgallen Bracket, who...
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SEMI-FINALS IN SONG
Carl Sigman—at the piano—wrote the lyrics for It’s All In the Game Love is when music stops being background music. Let’s focus a little. We have two match-ups before the final. “The Good Life” by...
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THE MADNESS ENDS. THE CHAMPIONSHIP.
Elvis in the 50s, Morrison in the 60s. Nothing else. In all the sweat, excitement, and hullabaloo—the inevitable cacophonous vanity of winning and the wailing sorrow of losing—we were able to pause at...
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EVERYONE GETS SUCKED INTO THE THEATER
Everyone gets sucked into the theater: the interrupting child, men who don’t like the theater, professors who teach history loudly in classrooms while a student thinks “I must clean my bathroom.” The...
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I WAS WRITHING IN SORROW
I was writhing in sorrow, blinded by world despair,When I wrote three lines of verseAnd made a universe there.
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I SURVIVED LOVING YOU
I survived loving you. After calling your name in ecstasy, you would find me writing poetry as if our love-making had never occurred— mood on mood replaced by word on word. Your name woke me that...
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OPEN TO LOVE
I was open to love, as open as I could be to her metaphor, which, like her, opened up all singing to poetry. The bass-line note traveled by boat. Right beside me was poetry, even as the melody...
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THE SKY
The beauty of the sky rescues the brute land the tracks run through. I was remembering St. Valentine’s day. And you. Was everything ugly like this, that day? Brown grass and naked trees. I only...
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ONLY AT FIRST
Only at first was it love—when the cold landscape was green, when newly I saw you, before you were really seen. Only at first was it love—before I finally knew old tricks of desire set up traps in...
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EXISTENCE IS CREATION IN REVERSE
It does not look at me—I look at it. The chain goes two different ways. A creator starts with the simple until they finally fashion from it the most complex: light to eye to brain to me. Creation goes...
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THE HISTORY OF MY POETRY
Of course your mind is a blank— how else do you think you have thoughts? When you and I had nothing to do that’s when my poetry was bad— and we were joyous and I loved you. That’s when we choked on...
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MY SORROW IS BETTER THAN YOUR SORROW
I’ve always had terrible skin. What’s the lesson here? My destiny lies within? I am beautiful—if you stand a certain distance away. No. Back up. There. Do you see me? A little further. Good. My...
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WHAT IS THIS I ADMIRE?
What is this I admire? Desire which should be none? Desire put in jars. To believe you were the one. Only the selfless deserves love. Now that I know how selfless you are— (you were even then...
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THE GOOD IS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH
You believed in Jesus as a boy but you were good enough to see good had nothing to do with reality. Good wasn’t good enough, so poetry was crushed by entertainment and the news. Marilyn Monroe became...
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THE STRUGGLE TO STAY UPRIGHT
The struggle to stay upright is vast and afflicts us all with so many imponderables. Our moral balloon fights in depths and heights to avoid destruction and the humiliation of the fall even to the...
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THE ROMANIAN POETRY OF DAN SOCIU, PLUS REMARKS ON FREE VERSE AND TRANSLATION
Dan Sociu is a Romanian poet who really makes you feel and think. A wonderful poet. Sociu is good enough to please in English translations—I made a stab at learning Romanian when I traveled to Arad,...
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NONE OF US KNEW
How fast flowers wilted, the ones I gave to you. Did the flowers know what life was? None of us knew. The baby tulips bend their heads inside a window of twilight blue. The dogs nap. Who knew what...
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SOMETIMES A SEAGULL HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SEA
Sometimes a seagull has nothing to do with the sea, Or wings with flight, or you with me. I heard a disturbance in spring, high under a large white cloud; Seagulls were circling far up—and they were...
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IF YOU ARE GOOD
If you are good, you are followed by envy; but bad gets you loved, for the bad needs love and poetry, so why shouldn’t we all be bad? The good is the way the sky looks when a thin cloud, barely...
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