In Another Part of the Twenties (1977), Paul A. Carter upended all of the stereo types advanced by historians about the 1920s. The jazz age was really more of a waltz than most people thought;…
You must have been lonely,
slowly swimming
in that vast darkness,
waiting
The Child is father to the Man Wordsworth You wake before the alarm you’d set for 4:30. You dress, almost ritually, and decide to fast. Today of all days you must maintain the proper mood—and…
Late at night, the kids in their rooms come
drifting towards me, thinking of home, perhaps,
wrestling a kiss fire of pain.
And the ward is yellow with breathing,
Although the exchange in Dialogue (Winter 1989) between Charles Boyd and David Bailey concerning the epistemological status of con temporary science was interesting and informative, in the final analysis it was lacking. To begin, Boyd…
The old hometown, Ogden, Utah, has long been an overlooked sports town. That is, if you take the adjective overlooked in an underground or an underworld sense, and if you broaden “sporting men” to include…
My father’s heart is strong and scarred, bound in spots by thread, a delicate patchwork of veiny fabrics. I imagine, when I talk to him on the telephone, his physical presence. I can hear his…
My sister and I had no whispered secrets
between us, shared no hollyhock days.
I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”
In times of drought, it is hard to remember times of flood. After yet another California winter without sufficient water, we take quick showers, rarely flush the toilet, let our lawn grow long to hide…