Introducing “Rhapsodies in Blue”
Sean MurphyJust 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: Charles Mingus’s Memento
It remains a blessing for this writer to find publications that “get” him –and what I’m attempting with my ongoing project (the first installment, of course, being The Blackened Blues, released…
Why Wayne Shorter Matters
Wayne Shorter is, for my money, possibly the most underrated genius in any genre of music. To be sure, he certainly received plenty of props within jazz circles and the people…
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…
Jeff Beck: The Guitar Grandmaster
As impossible at it is to believe Jeff Beck has died (aged 78), it’s just as difficult to fathom that he was with us in the first place. If you’re…
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…
2022: A Creative Recap
From 1455’s Movable Type, Issue 13 (peruse the complete archives, here). So, what’s next? It’s possible this endeavor could continue to evolve and grow in the right ways, or we might…
Pelé: Ambassador of Joy
There are two ways to describe what a big deal it was to receive this toy as a Christmas gift in 1970-something. First, it was high tech entertainment for the…
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…