Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “History Lessons”
these bleak, dispiriting days since the events of November 5, 2024. Here is the penultimate bouquet from my front yard dahlia farm. One week from today, this year’s deconstruction begins: cutting down the stalks, laying out the plastic to cover the plants, then bark mulch on top of that to (hopefully) keep the tubers from freezing over the wet, winter months…
I have spent the past few days attempting to fit random-shaped jigsaw pieces into a puzzle. My back is to the television set where my convalescing spouse watches the second season of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy for the second time; we originally saw them during the pandemic when they first migrated from CNN (which we don’t get because we don’t have cable) to HBO…
It seems fitting to post this nod to an excellent primer about tyranny today, February 29, 2024, after the clearly compromised majority of our current Supreme Court decided yesterday to hear a treasonous criminal’s plea for immunity from any and all crimes committed when he was the (accidental) President of the United States…
After the shock of the November 2016 presidential election in the United States, things got very real very fast. The following year it often felt like the rat-a-tat of explosions perhaps even rapid gunfire—the cruel and verging-on-fascists nonsense that the administration started to spew. It was hard not to have the edginess of politics creep into the writing of poems
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Scene on Radio just concluded their latest and, once again, excellent sixth podcast series entitled Echoes of a Coup. I just finished listening to it today. In five outstanding, riveting, at times shocking and heartbreaking episodes, we as listeners learn of yet another pivotal historical event that has been consciously and deliberately erased—whitewashed is perhaps the better terms—from the annals of American history…
End of the holiday season so swiftly upon us. Ornaments wrapped, stored in the growing inventory of empty Garrett’s popcorn cans. Glass icicles removed, laid to rest in a metal, candy-caned tin tied with a sateen bow. Strings of red beads, garland, back in their indigo blue box. Light strings unclipped and tied with twine until needed again next year…
In the summer of 2022, I started to read Heather Clark’s acclaimed new biography, Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Seven pages into the first chapter entitled “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” we learn that not only is there a multi-generational history of mental illness in Plath’s family but, unknown to her, her paternal grandmother, Ernestine, was committed to the Salem asylum by her husband, Theodore, in October 1916…
The maple leaves were already falling in our backyard habitat when I decided it was time to read another big biography. This one is W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868—1919 by David Levering Lewis. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994. And actually this volume is only Part 1 of this bio; Part 2 (another chubby tome) also won the Pulitzer Prize…
Last week was a leisurely, slow-travel road trip with a friend to the southeastern hills of Eastern Washington and Spokane then a loop back to PDX via Moses Lake and Yakima. We took in many truly awesome sights, scenes, vistas
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In 2019, the Beautiful Cadaver Project of Pittsburgh, Pennsyylvania put together an outstanding collection, The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jt. and Anne Frank; two of my poems, “Politics and the American Language” and “Still Birmingham” were published in it…
