National Poetry Month Meets Bud Powell (and more metaphor)
Sean MurphyAnother wonderful Facebook memory prompts me to recall how incredibly productive things were, this time seven years ago, albeit not in the ways I'd intended. To recap, I headed up…
National Poetry Month Meets Bukowski & Metaphor
This pic popped up in my Facebook memories today. Reminding me not only of the great Martha's Vineyard Adventure in 2016, via the Noepe Center for Literary Arts (RIP), but…
Original Poetry: Six Haikus for America
Just in time for #NationalPoetryMonth, the amazing team at Exterminating Angel Press has dropped the Spring 23 issue of their magazine on the theme of Recipes for Disaster. Tons of…
Introducing “Rhapsodies in Blue”
Just in time to properly celebrate National Poetry Month, my second collection, Rhapsodies in Blue, is now available! You can pick up a paperback or Kindle version here. I'd love you to…
Original Poem: Pharoah Sanders Donating Blood to Buy Food, 1962
A young Sanders with his mentor and bandmate John Coltrane Huge gratitude to the team at Decolonial Passage for including my work in their "Food, Power, and Powerlessness" issue. (It's…
Original Poem: St. James’s Place
I've only been to Atlantic City one time (friend's bachelor party, obvi) and, admittedly, not being a gambler or fan of rooms thick with cigarette smoke (circa 2002), and loathing…
The Fire Sermon: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100
Art is long, and Time is fleeting, Longfellow wrote, and we’d already read it—words largely if not entirely lost on the average university freshman. It was 1989, and I was…
Kurt Vonnegut at 100
So It Goes: Reflections on Kurt Vonnegut (written after his death in 2007 and included in my first collection of non-fiction, Murphy's Law Vol. One). Kurt Vonnegut would say in…
Deliver Me From Nowhere: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ at 40
Perhaps because of what followed—the next album, the acclaim—Springsteen’s decision to make the ultimate lo-fi album seems even more prescient, appropriate, and perfect. If Darkness on the Edge of Town was a,…
Original Poem: Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Bottle
It's a thrill to once again grace the pages of The Blue Mountain Review. As someone who runs an exceedingly modest (though sublimely designed -- thanks again to 1455 Creative…