Joe Schuster

You live a decent length you get an appreciation for the individuality of creation. … Everybody carries a world.
— Niall Williams, This is Happiness

Wonderful. Congratulations on the publication, but mostly for the poem itself.

Amen to this.

Oh, man…

missourireview.com/lippman/?fbc...

When my daughter married the year before last, she and her husband used this as a reading during their ceremony.

1. 39 Steps
2. North by Northwest
3. Rear Window
4. Foreign Correspondent
5. Notorious

My First Bookstore 1. Another Family / My grandfather liked to hang around Moishe Cheshinsky’s bookstore

poets.org/poem/my-firs...

Just read this in the current issue of THE SUN. I will be carrying this with me all day.

www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/592...

I’d let my subscription to The Sun lapse awhile ago, but re-upped. Just read Tonino’s “Shift.” What a dense, moving poem. So, thanks for the prompt.

Thanks. I will check it out.

Who is it…since now I’m curious?

Rabbit Is Up to Tricks poem - Joy Harjo In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone, Until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no ...

Each day for the last month, I’ve been reading a poem and the essay about it in Edward Hirsch’s The Heart of American Poetry. Today, sadly, I read the last…though the book will stay with me as it has (with no exaggeration) changed my life. Today’s poem seems apt. www.best-poems.net/joy-harjo/ra...

National Poetry Month…today’s reading in Edward Hirsch’s The Heart of American Poetry:

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/...

I think the best writing makes us say, I could never do that…I want to try to do that.

On Philip Levine’s “To Cipriano, in the Wind” Where did your words go, Cipriano spoken to me 38 years ago in the back of Peerless Cleaners, where raised on a little wooden platform you bowed to the hissing press and under the glaring bulb the …

Another stunning piece of work for National Poetry Month: sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2021/10/...

“‘On and on into the gathering darkness – is there no remedy for this?’ (John) Ashbury asked in Three Poems. There is not. We are always on the brink of destruction. But attention can be paid, art created.”
—Edward Hirsch, on John Ashbury’s “Soonest Mended,” in The Heart of American Poetry

I’ve been reading Edward Hirsch’s godsend of a book, The Heart of American Poetry, at the rate of one poem/essay a day. Today’s poem broke my heart and, as always, Hirsch’s essay about it broke my heart a bit more. Happy National Poetry Month to all of us. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42657/...

Sometimes at night I listen to old radio murder mystery series and some of them include the cigarette ads, which sometimes mention the company gave away X hundred cartons to soldiers in Europe.

Windows on the World, by Frederic Beigbeder
#FridayReads

Related question…how much is it if you just want to go to the book fair and buy more than you know you should?

I hear you. The entire time my son was in Iraq and Afghanistan I checked news sites countless times a day, looking at maps when I saw reports of deaths, calculating how far it was from his FOB, wondering if there was a chance his team might’ve been there. Bless you, and your son. May he be safe.

“We’re in this together, and by in I mean under.
Make America over again. Teach it to pray.
And by pray, I mean listen. There is always less to say.”
—from “September 15, 2020,” by John Okrent, from his crown of sonnets written during the pandemic, “This Costly Season”

As the father of a decorated former soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I find it reprehensible that anyone would not acknowledge how egregious this was. It was only luck that none of our military who put their lives on the line for the US were not killed because of this. Shame on them.

What, exactly, would it look like if people showed their upset? People throwing Molotov cocktails? They’re doing that. People calling their reps and senators? Ditto. Marching? Ditto. What the heck do you expect? Why don’t people in the media stop normalizing graft and lying? What are YOU doing?

Olympus I was a cobbler in the house of the Gods.

A marvelous poem by Matthew Olzmann, on poem-a-day. poets.org/poem/olympus...

Heartbreaking.

Oh, so stunning.

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry….Is there any other way?”
—Emily Dickinson, quoted in The Heart of American Poetry, by Edward Hirsch

“We are made of breathing
and breathing ends. But we are also made of dust, which doesn’t.
The air is warm tonight, and barely there, like a memory of being
touched. Life isn’t fair — it’s beautiful.”
….from April 30, 2020, in This Costly Season, by John Okrent

“…her joy consisted, in the main, of a satisfaction of pure instincts and a deep sense of gratitude to those who made her life what it was.” — George Gissing, The Nether World