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The Witch, The Swan, And The Middle Class

I’m not praising the middle class, but we are returning to the problem of why so many of our poems carry no values except private ones. I think the universities have had a part in this. One could say that the M.F.A. programs de-class a young poet.

At The End Of The Fiscal Year

Ten months prior to being eligible for his company’s pension and benefit plan, after almost twenty years, Ben Ross was fired.

The Gabriel Books

Education

“The Gabriel Books” are a series of small cartoon books.

Teaching, And The Mood Of Relativity

Many years ago when I first taught college English, I made a discovery in the first or second week of teaching, namely, that the main obstacle to instruction, to one’s ability to teach someone something they don’t already know, is the mood and spirit of relativity.

Sunbeams

There are said to be creative pauses,
pauses that are as good as death, empty
and dead as death itself.
And in these awful pauses the
evolutionary change takes place.

D.H. Lawrence

Sunbeams

There’s nothing wrong with the world. What’s wrong is our way of looking at it.

Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Black Reaper

We couldn’t have been more delighted, Buck and I, he in the warm arms of Mr. Boston, me in the warm arms of life in the sunny south, at a time when the shadows were hazy, the sunshine was bright, and the smell of the newly cropped bermuda grass touched my nostrils, and the days awaited me breathlessly, endlessly.

Man Of Silver, Man Of Gold

That crumbling house with its rusty iron fence, like a disillusioned spider’s web, became important. Even its blotch of drained soil, discolored and long sterile, was a symbol of warfare. This spelled out a larger drama of the world I was just beginning to realize I was living in.

The Music In My Life

A folk-mass at church, a mountain cabin full of friends, Sunday nights at the San Dune Tavern

Theme For English 1200

“As a white person,” a student asks me, “are you uncomfortable teaching black literature to blacks?”

“Of course,” I answer. “Of course.”