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Loyalties

I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.

Russia, My Heart

Russia, once the poor turned to you, but you betrayed them. You told them how hard it was. You went on vacation and said help would arrive on the next train. In the bitter cold, they waited at the station, while their children starved, and still they waited.

Reflections Of A Ninety-Three-Year-Old Revolutionary

An Interview With Hazel Wolf

If I’d known as a child what I know now, I’d have become an environmentalist on the spot. I guess you could say that my childhood dreams led me first to help people in their individual environments — housing and health care, and things like that. But I ended up working to save our natural home.

In My Father’s Arms

My keeper hurled me into the hole, and jumped in after me. She pulled the floorboards back into place, over our heads, and we were engulfed in darkness as the hammering against the front door started. I tried to call out, but her thick arm snaked around my chest, and her calloused palm clamped over my mouth, as the sound of wood splintering, and then crashing, exploded all around us.

A Few Lessons They Won’t Forget

The Disgrace Of Modern Schooling

While teaching means different things in different places, seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. I intend no irony here. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach.

Heaven On Earth

A Conversation Between A Political Radical And A Spiritual Seeker

Radical: You talk about yoga, and meditation, and prayer, and the search for ultimate truth. But what is your spirituality in practice? Spiritual Seeker: You’re so angry. What kind of change will you create if you’re dominated by these feelings? Will the world you build be so different from the one we have now?

Selected Poems

Mastering The Enemy Within

An Interview With Richard Strozzi-Heckler

My idea of a new warrior is one who takes on the challenge of facing his or her own aggression — mentally, physically, emotionally. The point is not to say that aggression is bad, but to recognize that it is within us, and to learn how to look at it and train it.

Agency For The Management Of Earthly Delight

Selected Poems