Last Bender

Seems to me the filthy old 2nd Earl of Rochester deserves to have a female companion. It is obviously a little more decorous but I have no doubts about where the fountain lies where rage is cooled. The Disappointment by Aphra Behn (1640?-1689) 1. One Day the Amarous Lisander, By an impatient Passion sway’d, Surpris’d [...]

Here’s a smutty tidbit from the Second Earl of Rochester: So a proud bitch does lead about  Of humble curs the amorous rout,  Who most obsequiously do hunt  The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.  Some power more patient now relate  The sense of this surprising fate.  Gods! that a thing admired by me  Should fall [...]

Birthday Knots of fire tighten on my brow a birthday ice in the pants free-for-all of Tulips Peonies Iris moss brightening in the careless spray of a waterfall wet bark among fiddleheads all day sun the cold mud beckoning worms teenage girls slap through it boys in bare feet laughing Brown Sugar First shadows of [...]

James Dufficy is an old friend who lives in London. He can observe the farce that is america from afar, or across a puddle anyway. I envy all of my friends who live overseas. Many years ago I lived in Australia, and after that New Zealand, in an effort to escape Ronald Reagan and the first George [...]

When my old friend Matthew Tolley was found dead, at the age of 35 (I think, the year escapes me now), in his Brooklyn apartment, it sent a wave through the Barzakh which aligned all that I had been reading and thinking with all that I knew and loved of him. We became friends in [...]

  Aphids have attacked the new growth on all of my rose bushes. They are foul, disgusting and full of the sweet life-giving juice of these plants. Dante’s divine vagina drained by larvae! O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy [...]

Last year Tim Congdon, a renegade poet and impresario who lived for a while in Ithaca, contacted me about participating in a poetry project to aid in the reconstruction of New Orleans. The concept was simple: poets from around the country would either go to their local Public Access TV station or get a friend [...]

I began reading The Anatomy of Melancholy on the recommendation of Ford Maddox Ford, who praised it in The March of Literature. He mentions that another of his favorite authors, Samuel Johnson, used to read it in bed in the morning as a way of preparing for the day. I took this advice and have [...]

This is the place where she lay her head when she went to bed at night And this is the place our children were conceived candles lit the room brightly at night And this is the place where she cut her wrists that odd and fateful night And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, [...]

A causal reader of this blogh might conclude that I am an anti-intellectual when it comes to poetry. While I think any of my poems or prose or these posts would show that I am not in the least bit anti-intellectual, but rather anti-academic, it is true that I believe poetry to be a product [...]