Erin Hoover • the nineties • the power of passive voice • What use are you?
George Kalamaras • Listening to “Park Avenue Petite,” Hearing My Rain-Raked Heart All Over Again • Jack Wilson Tries to Convince Roy Ayers to Join His Quartet, 1963 • One Night in Indy, January 18, 1959, Eddie Higgins Trio with an Unknown Bassist • Not Just Forest Rain but Bamboo Hollow: Fancy Miss Nancy’s “Happy Talk”
David Kirby • Demons, Also Saints, Scientists, and Love-Struck Sophomores • Outfit Alert! • Gerda Weismann is Putting on Her Ski Boots
Special thanks to
• Mary Ellen Bercik
• Bomb
• Book Riot
• Elizabeth Bruce
• Susann Cokal
• Margaret Grosh
• George Kalamaras • Literary Hub
• Michael Martone • Maritza Rivera
• Verse Daily. And humongous thanks to Marci Nadler for introducing me to Amy and Jamie Potter of The Crooked Angels (for CD issue #76) and also to Laura Costas for stepping in at last second to insert a TOC for Music Gigs Gone Wrong.
Wendy Guberman -Electronic mag layout
last words
“All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’” —Sonia Sanchez
“It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.” —William Gass
“I write fiction because it doesn’t make claims to Truth or pronouncements or general statements about life, it narrates them. —Lynne Tillman
“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” — Andrew Gide
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
–June Jordan
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” –Ray Bradbury
“I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.” –George R.R. Martin
“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”—Alice Walker
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything elseon earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigidsquares of paper unfolds world after world after world.”
–Anne Lamott
“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”
—Joy Harjo
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
–Victor Hugo
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
“Books don’t just go with you. They take you where you’ve never been.”
–Anonymous