We do our best to be hospitable to poets passing through Buffalo. But we can’t stop the house next to us from catching on fire. Which is a not uncommon occurrence in certain neighborhoods in Buffalo. Old houses, old wires, a few generations of downwardly mobile inhabitants in an emptying neighborhood, deferred maintenance, newer power-sucking appliances, fire.
I’ve been thinking about David Berman’s suicide lately as I pick up, wobbly, his song “Nights That Won’t Happen,” in which he is thinking about it. I suspect because there’s a lot of reason for despair right now, and I’m coming to term with that… Read More
I just read a zig-zagging set of stanzas conveying the prismatic ecological vision of Jennifer Howard (I’ll include them at the end of this post) in Toward Some Air, ed. by Fred Wah & Amy De’ath, somewhere between procrastinating and giving myself what I needed in the post-anesthesia haze of a medical procedure and realized this post is too late. It was supposed to be about ephemera and now that ephemera is gone so I guess it still is.
JOE HALL 