The days spent in Durham were bitter-sweet. Any persons death is sad, and that of a sister is particularly dark. People count and family members count most of all. I delighted to see the resurgence of my hometown. The medium sized, blue-collar town, integrated into the tobacco farming rural counties when I grew up…
A few days spent in my hometown of Durham involves a visit to the city park alongside the Eno River. The park is on the site of one of the first settlements in the area before Durham could have been called a town. Before railroads, grist mills along the river were places of gathering…
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. and I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything that I…
My sister, after suffering beyond words, from schizophrenia, and conditions of day to day life bereft of family, — passed on Saturday July 27. The meaning of a life cannot be positively expressed, but the absence is felt, much as the ruin of a edifice can be felt. I miss her and will always…
In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it. There is a real difference here though people turn to the imagination without knowing it in life and to reality without knowing it in arts and letters. —…
Here I am, another day in the town where I grew up. I am here for the funeral of my sister, the last of our family to live in Durham, North Carolina. I will miss my sister. I feel grief over what we both missed while growing up. Things were as they were. The…
Words make, and have made a world, that transcends the world and a life livable in that transcendence. It is a transcendence achieved by the minor effects of figurations and the major effects of the poet’s sense of the world and of the motive music of his/her poems and it is the imaginative dynamism…
What to say and how to say it? Unable to write anything yesterday, waking in the predawn gray I handed the luggage over to the limo driver. The day began with the familiar ground-tone of anxiety, — I didn’t want to miss our flight. My mind flashed back to when I was a boy. …
THE SOLUTIONS OF DREADFUL NIGHT (excerpt) by James Thomson We do not ask a longer term of strife, Weakness and weariness and nameless woes: We do not claim renewed and endless life When this which is our torment here shall close, An everlasting conscious inanation! We yearn for speedy death in full…
Another day’s grind. That sounds like a unwarranted complaint. As a matter of fact I’m an old white guy, benefiting from ruling class privilege. There are many blue-collar tradesmen not as secure as I happen to be, to say nothing of persons of color working their way up, competing with Caucasian peers…… I have…
