Egregious Reader

On Friday coming home from work I caught this interview on NPR: ( here ) Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations." This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues: CORNISH: MTV had this survey on millennials and their attitude toward racial inequality and one of the things they found that millennials overwhelmingly see racism as a problem for older people, right? And then they aspire to colorblindness. Are you essentially trying to introduce this idea, which has like come and gone in many iterations over the decades to the Obama generation? COATES: Yeah, that makes me very, very sad. I think what happens is that those young people are the inheritance(ph) of an unfortunate idea, and that is that what really needs to happen to solve the - quote-unquote - "race problem" is to ...

I finished my first reading of Collected Poems 1957-1982 this morning. I was given this book seven years ago by a friend who still a regular part of my life. It was at my 30th birthday party. In the inside cover I wrote down all the names of the people who came to my party. I can still look over this list and remember how much I enjoyed that part. However, there is also some sadness, as the great majority of those who attended I have lost all contact with. There are circumstances that explain this happening to some extent, but it is decidedly foreign to the world that Berry commends to us in these poems. There are many poems in this collection that are important to me. I will touch on two: This is from At a Country Funeral: But our memory of ourselves, hard earned, is one of the land's seeds, as a seed is the memory of the life of its kind in its place, to pass on into life the knowledge of what has died. What we owe the future is not a new start, for we ca...

I am supposed to read something tomorrow night at our 5X15 night (15 artists sharing something for 5 minutes each). I feel pretty close to choosing a handful of my poetry and reading it (3 or 4 short pieces that I had previously strung together) ... I am just very aware at how stark and angry it sounds. I wonder how it will come across and what is more, most of my writing is like this. I don't know if it has to do with maturing or dispossession, but I find it incredibly hard to write about light and beauty and joy ... most of my writing is about sadness and loneliness and the unending (though often unnoticed) troubles in our country. I take comfort only in coming across some great writers who seem to give credence to my way of writing and the topics I am always tackling with pen and lyric. I am thinking of Walker Percy and his belief in the novelist as diagnostic for the soul. And Flannery O'Connor and her grotesque and violent short stories that are able to push us to the edge...