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This Season’s People

You want your reality just loose enough that you can do a little miracle now and then. But not so loose that it starts getting chancy and problematical for the kids and the folks out on the fringes. It has to be good and solid for everybody.

Poet Of The Ordinary: Paul Goodman Remembered

Book Review

I have made this essay personal because I find I cannot be objective about Paul Goodman. I have never fully understood what it is about the man that has so compelled me, what held in my mind the memory of those few days I saw him, what kept me searching through his works until I found access to them.

The Christ Of The Double-Wides

It was during the Christmas season that reports started to circulate about a cross that was appearing in the bathroom of a mobile home owned by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Harley.

The Sacred And The Profane

Shall we throw Hustler and the Times into the fire? And, years from now, when these words and this argument are forgotten, shall we make into a funeral pyre the “spiritual” tracts we now so revere, those that spell out for us the right way, when we’re all heading the same way?

Another Appetite

It is April and the cold wind shears through Spring, sharp and strident, cutting away the warmth that had been nuzzling the earth. The daffodils have been shredded and the azaleas’ fragile blooms are scissored to limp bits of faded rag.

Shadow Dancing

When Sy and I were consoling each other about life’s turbulence, he pantomimed our boyhood baseball heroes rescuing homerun balls from going over the centerfield fence. “Catch it gracefully.” Catch this pain, frustration, hunger, craziness, gracefully.

Of God And My Father

A Memoir

I sat on the couch less to read than to be enveloped in that atmosphere. I was too old, by then, to sit with him in his chair, feel the warmth of his breath on my head, smell the faint odor of his sweat, but being just a few feet away was almost as comforting.

A Note On James Dickey

I found in James Dickey not only these allegedly “Southern” themes but also something else — that universal struggle between the spirit and the flesh. However grotesque his imagination was, this man, I felt, had more to say about the matter than any other living poet.

Too Old To Rock And Roll, Too Young To Die

Mike looked at me quizzically while Greg Wells, another WQDR disc jockey (or “jock,” as they say in the business), delivered this devastating insight: “Well, you know what it is, Dave . . . You’re just getting old.”

Journal

And when our eyes met, you said silently to me, don’t remind me, not as a reprimand but because these moments, this coming together, was a last blooming lily which I should not point at but rather unfurl my own petals in harmony with yours.