I’m thinking of Pat Rahmann. Her death notice was in the Sun-Times yesterday. I had not seen Pat for a couple of years. After she left Glencoe, she moved several times and I lost track of her. The last time we were together Lois Hauselman picked her up and a couple of us joined them and Rochelle Distelheim at the Lucky Platter. Lois is gone and so is Rochelle and now Pat is too. She was an integral and essential member of The Writers and someone I looked up to and … [Read more...]
Happy Father’s Day
This Sunday is Father’s Day. No doubt you’ll read many saccharine accounts of fathers and what it means to be a parent and to be parented. But reality is not usually as sweet. Sometimes the people in our lives cannot be summed up with sentimentality. One of my favorite poems is This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin because it views parenting as flawed at best. Of course it is overly cynical. Nevertheless, there is much truth in this jaundiced view of parenting as imperfect and … [Read more...]
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all
The other day I was on Twitter and was struck by a tweet contrasting the fact that we have a robot helicopter on Mars while on Earth some people are trying to convince children to remove their masks during a pandemic. He linked to the first stanza of Alexander Pope’s "An Essay on Man Epistle 11," which I provide below (thanks to the Poetry Foundation). I won’t pretend that I’ve read the entire work by Alexander Pope, which was written in 1773-1774, and which was … [Read more...]
Van Gogh solace
Tuesday was a beautiful day in Chicago, which was restorative and lovely. Also lovely and restorative is the Immersive Van Gogh at Chicago’s Germania Club. It is the first cultural event I have gone to since the pandemic started. In some ways, it was not business as usual; temperatures were scanned, everyone was masked, and circles were marked on the floor to show us where to stand six feet apart. But in some ways it felt like a welcome return to normal. Maybe the event … [Read more...]
Prayers and poetry of DMX
Earl Simmons, better known as the rapper DMX, died last week. I didn’t know much about him or his raps; the only music of his that was even slightly familiar to me was “Party Up (Up in Here)." But the more I read about him on Twitter and heard about him on The Breakfast Club and other news reports, the more I wanted to learn about him. People called him a poet and a preacher. In an MTV interview, DMX said he thought of his lyrics as poetry. He appeared on Def Poetry with a … [Read more...]
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