Jerry Collamer muses on the sanctity of life, the impact and burden of death, and the awakening of a child to the reality of the world.
Tag: poetry
Lady Lazarus: The Hurt Imagination of Sylvia Plath
Robert Pinsky on Sylvia Plath: “Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Subversive Champion of the Disinherited
Almost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism.
Emily Dickinson: A Mystic of Stillness Who Mocked Heaven
Emily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. Unafraid of her own passions and talent, she embraced the world around her, yet faced a debilitating illness and family intrigue.
Dirty Realism: The Anti-Social Satire of Charles Bukowski
I go outside – and all up and down the street – the green armies shoot color – like an everlasting 4th of July, – and I too seem to swell inside, – a kind of unknown bursting, – a feeling, perhaps, that there isn’t any – enemy – anywhere
Jack Kerouac’s Lowell Blues: Cast-off Boots of Time
Jack Kerouac wrote in 1950: “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America–for reasons which are never deeper than the music. Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of a country.”
To Erzulie of the Seductive Summoning Sea
Here we follow poet Lenelle N. Moise’s surreal submergence into her mother’s passion for water, the sea, vodoun. Imagery, juxtapositions, fluidity, they haunt this reverie, influenced by unseen forces, diaspora and the Haitian sea goddess Erzulie.