DON VON VLIET RIP

JAMES MOODY RIP

SOLOMON BURKE RIP

THIS WAS A MAN-MADE DISASTER

DO NOT EVER FORGET THAT THIS WAS MAN-MADE!

FLANNERY O'CONNOR b MARCH 25TH 1925

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

i've believed for a while now that college freshmen should be handed copies of augustine's confessions, o'connor's collected short stories, dashiell hammett's the maltese falcon, charles olson's call me ishamel, w.c williams' in the american grain, ralph ellison's invisible man & james baldwin's the fire next time & be left alone to digest what's found in the pages of those books.
what the hell do i know?

UNCIVIL WAR

"Congress was voting on my well-being Sunday night. Congress was voting on the survivability of my family. And one political party voted unanimously against my family. That is something I will never, ever forget." ron silliman

the rest of his eloquent analysis on his blog here. silliman is a poet, not a pundit.

"They are the people who have "invaded" "us." The hippie commie queers, the blacks who "snuck in" on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.) " ron silliman

ai, poet, RIP

Abortion

Coming home, I find you still in bed,
but when I pull back the blanket
I see your stomach is flat as an iron.
You've done it, as you warned me you would
and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper
for me to look at. My son.
Woman, loving you no matter what you do,
what can I say, except that I've heard
the poor have no children, just small people
and there is room only for one man in this house.

i first read her in the american poetry review in the early 70s. it was the first year of their venture & i'd already been blown away by john ashbery & soon, thomas mcgrath. ai's poetry was visceral & spoke plainly & bluntly like someone you'd meet in a dark bar drinking during daylight hours. as troubling as some of the poems were, they never strained credulity. if the outrigger experience taught me anything, it's that some of the most awful things that happen to us can seem so mundane. if i'd paid more attention to her poetry, i might have skipped the direct experience of that truism.
the cover of her first book of poems(my own copy now long gone):

her l.a. times obit here.
more on ai here.