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February 1980

On The Run

Russia invades Afghanistan, and the United States, playing the outraged suitor, wags its hips at China. The problem of relationship is global and personal. What are the boundaries? Who do we kiss and who do we kill?

Selected Poems

Joe

There But For The God Of Grace Go I

He decided that if looking into the darkness could evoke both bears with frying pans and wonderful fantasy worlds, then it was all a matter of the manner in which he went about looking that determined what would confront him. He was still scared of the dark so he limited his looking to moments of strong neurotic necessity, but the vision had been so powerful he never again seriously considered brick and mortar as being in any way, shape or form representational of reality.

Apocalypse Later

Turning The Vietnam War Into A Cartoon Lets Everyone Off The Hook

Years ago I read an essay by Hannah Arendt in which she said that the Nuremburg trials were necessary because they assigned responsibility for crimes to people who, in fact, had the responsibility not to commit them. Her concept was that if one declared everybody in Germany guilty, then no one was guilty — guilt became a condition of being, or something connected to the stars, a notion antipathetic to anyone interested in establishing a little decency on earth.

Therefore Choose Life

George Wald Speaks Out On Nuclear Energy, The American Revolution, Survival

Some of you may remember what the 60s were like. You know, things were moving. The kids were making every mistake in the book, but they were learning. My generation wasn’t learning, it was past learning. But they were learning, and then they stopped. I think it was a major event in human history. And I’m old enough to be very impatient, for them to get to it again. That poor guy Phil Ochs, nice person, committed suicide, Phil Ochs had that song, I’m Not Marching Anymore. A mistake. You have to keep marching. Stop marching, it’s over. A revolution that stops is lost. That goes for the American Revolution.

Fathers

Memoirs Of A Professional Killer

Some Sea Stories From The Big Deuce

Once they gave a war, and everybody came. They called it World War II, and the entire basis of this essay is that one man’s recollections of it — necessarily different from every other man’s — are worth preserving.

February 1978

We are free to do most anything, yet, understanding so little about freedom, we confuse it with license, as we confuse living with style.

Selected Poems