If Dylan died tomorrow, this book would be a fitting last word.
Category Archives: Poetry
A New Poetic Form: The Hourglass Sestina
I’ve been working with artist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker Lee Fearnside on an illustrated collection of poems titled The Fantastic Bestiary. During the writing process for this collection, I came up with the idea of an abbreviated sestina form that would usually take the approximate shape of an hourglass if centered on the page. ThoseContinue reading “A New Poetic Form: The Hourglass Sestina”
Pete Townshend and World War II
I have three iTunes playlists dedicated to The Who — 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to the present — and I can’t listen through them without being impressed, over and over again, by Pete Townshend’s genius. Record sales aside, his creative accomplishments exceed that of the Beatles, Dylan, or the Rolling Stones throughout the 60s andContinue reading “Pete Townshend and World War II”
“All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday”: Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism
“The Last Time I Saw Richard”. . . is a Romantic tour-de-force with respect to lyrics, composition, and performance. In the folk song tradition, Mitchell sings to her own musical accompaniment, and there is no other instrument playing in the recording; yet, the melodic and harmonic complexity of the song makes for a performance farContinue reading ““All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday”: Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism”
“Work Me, Lord”: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues
Like the more traditional blues before her, Joplin’s soulful white blues, her “kozmic blues,” is similar to Romantic poetry, as it is charged with radical praxis; it is an unwaveringly personal music that conveys much about Joplin emotionally, and in turn, the sociocultural climate of the flower children in the mid- to late-1960s. The radicalContinue reading ““Work Me, Lord”: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues”
The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 