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The Indolence of Decadence - Lowell's Alfred Corning Clark
After initially establishing himself at the beginning of his career as a talented poet with a rhetorical style--marked by a dense, rich dose of metaphysical formalism--Robert Lowell "thawed out" in the...
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Elephant Panorama
You'll need a big computer screen to see all of this image. It's uncredited on the internet, but it's so inspiring, I had to put it up. Stretch your window as wide as your screen will go. On my screen...
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Twin Obituaries
We keep losing people.That's life. This last week two poets whom I knew, and had published early in their careers, both died within 48 hours of each other: Bill BerksonBlue Is the HeroTed...
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On the Seventh Day of Summer
On the seventh day of Summer, my true love gave to me . . . a new cocktail recipe!Summer is here, and everyone is floating along in oblivious continuity. Going about their business as if nothing had...
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Creeley's Oppen
I've written previously about George Oppen's Discrete Series, in a blogpost here under Minimalism Part IV, on July 30, 2009. As an example of an approach to verse that employed a reductive, spare...
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When To Cut Your Losses
In the Bay Area, we have the luxury of two major league baseball franchises--the San Francisco Giants, and the Oakland Athletics. Over the last several years, these respective teams have pursued very...
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When To Cut Your Losses
In the Bay Area, we have the luxury of two major league baseball franchises--the San Francisco Giants, and the Oakland Athletics. Over the last several years, these respective teams have pursued very...
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When To Cut Your Losses
In the Bay Area, we have the luxury of two major league baseball franchises--the San Francisco Giants, and the Oakland Athletics. Over the last several years, these respective teams have pursued very...
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The Updated Gimlet
Here's a small departure from tradition in the form of an augmented Gimlet. The Gimlet, according to a 1953 Raymond Chandler novel The Long Goodbye, is half gin and half Rose's lime juice. And what...
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Creeley's Oppen
I've written previously about George Oppen's Discrete Series, in a blogpost here under Minimalism Part IV, on July 30, 2009. As an example of an approach to verse that employed a reductive, spare...
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The Permission of The Meadow: Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a...
Robert Duncan [1919-1988] was an important figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, who also had important literary connections to Black Mountain, the Beats, gay literary issues, etc. By any measure,...
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Growth - Who Needs It?
In yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, the lead Editorial was devoted to California Governor Jerrys Brown's proposal to "streamline the approval process for certain kinds of new housing development."...
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Arsenic / Absinthe in the Limelight - Green in the work of Henri de...
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec [1864-1901] seems almost like a figure from mythology. You couldn't make up a person like that, except perhaps as a figure in a French fairy tale. Physically deformed from an...
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Wright's Hanna - The "Honeycomb House"
Frank Lloyd Wright's career was a long one, and it divides chronologically into distinct periods. Born in the middle of the Victorian 19th Century, he lived to be 91, and even at the end, he was still...
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Downstream from Richard Brautigan
As a book trader, it's my experience to encounter tens of thousands of books all the time, sifting through them for sleepers, sorting and discriminating at will. As a dealer in "modern first editions"...
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Massey's Second Collection
William Carlos Williams famously declared "no ideas but in things"--by which he meant that poetry should be constructed out of references to actual objects, events, people. This was a reaction to the...
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Still More Variations from the Stainless Steel Counter
In the constantly shifting round-robin of ingredients, inevitably there will be some duplication. How many permutations are possible today, given the number of different kinds of spirits, liqueuers,...
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Article 0
The Giants went 57-33 before the All Star break. They've gone 23-39 since. It's consternating to realize that if they'd only managed to play .500 ball, or 31-31 in the 62 games since the break, they be...
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Prow of the Viking
Who knows whether one of my distant ancestors, originating in Norway, ever sailed in one of these boats--to England, Greenland, Russia, or perhaps even the Northeast corner of the North American...
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