Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

The word “boy” stings. I realize he has purposely chosen the word to convey the feeling of how it must have sounded to generations of black men. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything, really. I was visiting a friend in the Peace Corps and now I’m going home.”  I have said the wrong thing again. After two weeks in the country I am aware that most people here are not too fond of Peace Corps Volunteers. Most Sierra Leonese think of them as American spies.

Steve Poleskie/Then and Now

Steve Poleskie/Then and Now

I don’t suppose that I am the only person who goes to sleep at night wondering if they will wake up to find the world at war. Or perhaps the war will have started by the time you read this article. I will not comment on the quality of the world leaders leading the world during these times…

W. P. Kinsella, In Memoriam

W. P. Kinsella, In Memoriam

In 1997, Bill was involved in a car accident that affected his cognition, rendering him unable to focus at length on anything. The accident also affected his senses of smell and taste. I remember talking to Bill about the effects and how he said he just couldn’t write anything creative any more.

From the Edge/Column

From the Edge/Column

Things started to come apart: we blamed each other for things little and large: cracks opened. Staying in the same house got progressively harder for us. I have to take responsibility for doing nothing to change the direction things were going. It really was my fault, and I’d declined a wonderful opportunity and wrecked almost twenty years of our very excellent relationship. Being pig-headed is an expensive behavior form, but I fit the definition, nicely. By mutual decision, I “temporarily” moved into a small campus area rental property we owned. I strayed. I strayed a lot.

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

The photo above is of me talking on a telephone when telephones were for talking on, not typing out messages to one’s friends with your thumb, or playing games, or getting directions that get you lost anyway. We still use a land line in our house, although my wife and I both have cell phones; or mobiles as they are called in the rest of the world…

Bill Dixon/From the Edge

Bill Dixon/From the Edge

Everyone develops a system of rationalizing their more aberrant behavioral issues, I suppose, and I have developed mine. I don’t watch much television. (Here comes the rationalization)….In Maine, I don’t have any means of doing so: no cable, no antenna, and absolutely no interest in turning on the tube even if I had the means to do so. Accordingly, for nearly six months out of the year, I don’t watch any TV at all − as in none!

Joseph H. Lindsley, 1920-2015

Joseph H. Lindsley, 1920-2015

Joe’s presence was a godsend to many directionless youth seeking someone who would listen to them without being judgmental. If anything, he was the ultimate encourager, listening, sharing, reinforcing the natural and native inclinations, and creativity, of those he knew. The constancy in his own work, and the encouragement he provided others to pursue their own dreams and creative urges, were a cure for their insecurity, and perhaps even his own best medicine for what sometimes must have been an ailing spirit. But spirited he was, and that’s how he is remembered here.

Remembering Nick Kolumban

Remembering Nick Kolumban

And then he went on telling me how much fun he had had later on that afternoon that stretched into the evening and the night in the company of other poets and artists, a real bunch of bohemians. When I pulled out an envelope from my pocket, stuffed with six or seven of my surrealist masterpieces, he looked at it as if I were serving him with summons to appear in court. I assured him it only contained my poems, he nodded in reluctant assent and stowed the wrinkled package in a thin paperback book he had in his hand. But then he changed his mind and shoved the book in my face.

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

The historically cold winter has finally left us. As it’s warmer now, we have the windows open; no air conditioning for our 150-year-old farmhouse. One thing my wife and I dislike about Florida is the need to have one’s air-conditioner cranked up all year long. Living on the side of a hill and having twenty acres of woods and fields, surrounded by a 700 acre state park, we enjoy having the windows up to let in a fresh breeze. Unfortunately, the open windows also let in the noise…

John Smelcer on Norman Mailer

John Smelcer on Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer holds a special place in American literature, and not simply because he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice (in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner’s Song), a feat few other novelists have achieved…