I’ve just finished one of the greatest novels written in the English language. It is difficult to do more that put down a few quotes, first by the Author, John Williams, and then from the novel, Stoner. Few people have read Stoner; nearly all who do say what I just did. Williams was born in [...]
CHAPTER EIGHT
Before going to lunch with Linda I stopped in at the office to chew things over with the guys. No one chews a bone better than a room full of rum faced, tobacco stained dicks.
The security section is a cinder block tank about four thousand feet square, with a tan vinyl floor, acoustic [...]
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the way to the car I passed McSorley’s. I could’ve let it slide. Nothing would’ve pleased me more in fact, except maybe an ice cream cone with nuts and sprinkles. But I had to stick it in. It had to be.
The door dinged open and shut. I gave the bottles the [...]
What are they spending all that money on clothes for, when all she needs is a Brown Shirt?
My only method for reading poetry is to follow the trail. Artistic lineages, like linguistic and genetic lineages, are endless. There is an unbroken line of communications from the first people to the present. But as the lineages diverge and mutate some lines are lost, some are obscured, some are absorbed and some are purged. [...]
“…to read without joy is stupid.”
John Williams (author of Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus)
CHAPTER SIX
Doctor and Mrs. St. Claude lived in northeast, where the streets are narrow and lined with tall trees and townhouses. Occasionally you come across a half block taken up by a monstrously ugly high rise. Between the drapes you see flashes of peach, mauve, and cappuccino, framed with black and white checks or [...]
Hayden Carruth, 1921-2008
The Last Poem in the World
Would I write it if I could?
Bet your glitzy ass I would.
Like many poets my age I first encountered Hayden Carruth without realizing it, by reading his anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us, in high school. Here was where we discovered Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Philip [...]
CHAPTER FIVE
“TIMOTHY Philip STRUNGil,” I said.
“Right,” he barked back across the three-foot stack of folders and binders, each marked with a bible’s worth of Post-its, skin blanched by the overhead lights. The man was solid, concentrated, with a strong neck and large head, hair squared-off like a hedge. He had a thick, handle [...]
My mother getting older sheds leaves
Like blessings of gold they flicker
In subsiding touches of sun
And turn to flutter in breath
Now warm, now abysmal.
Wind off the lake
Rises through valleys
Returns to dark gullies
To whistle in shale
Or play in our hair
And take blessings
As leaves to the air
She stands in her bark
Bearing the bends and quiets
Passionate, young and desirous
She [...]
contact: jon@lastbender.com