First published on Dandelion Salad in 2008. Originally published in 2005.
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Nov. 20, 2012 Continue reading
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 8, 2012
Image by Collin David Anderson via Flickr
Do not call them “heroes”
if they have done your killing for you.
Say that they have done your bidding;
say they were your “soldiers.”
Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
December 30, 2011
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr
“One Law for Lion and Ox is Oppression.” –William Blake
“Where is the place of understanding? Where is wisdom to be found?” —The Book of Job
Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts! Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces! Continue reading
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
29 October 2011
Last week, Barbara “wah-wah” Walters—thank you, Gilda Radner!—was trotted in front of ABC’s Evening News cameras to assure those familes still chowing down that the brutal, disgusting, illegal, savage beating, sodomization and execution of Libyan “dictator” Gaddafi was… understandable… because, he was “crazy.”
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
September 13, 2011
1.
He hoisted her a little higher on his back. …
If only Mother had followed Sister’s counsel about the pumice stone—or had allowed Sister to use the stone on her (and to trim her long toenails, as well!)—her calloused heels would not be chafing his ribs and hips through the thin fabric of his summer yukata.
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 12, 2011
“Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!” — William Shakespeare (Othello)“It would be supererogatory for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is coming.” — Anthony Burgess, “Is America Falling Apart?” (1971)
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 28, 2011
Image by frankkeillor via Flickr
The people of Somalia are not like us.
Their skin is black and gray and parched by sun.
They carry their babies on bony hips,
Walking for miles for a little water.
Even their babies are resigned to death,
Hollow-eyed, fly-covered, without the strength
To cry, without the will to endure.
Image by Joanna Penn via Flickr
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 23, 2011
Attitude
He brought his poem to the workshop.
First the axmen came to chop off the legs.
Then chiselers came to chisel out eyes.
Dabblers daubed painterly oil,
deconstructing carping scaffolding.
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 10, 2011
Among the nostrums I was taught as an English Lit under-grad, and then a grad student, was the idea that biography had no place in Criticism. This notion arrived with the “New Critics” of the 1930s—some pretty bright lights, actually, who—as the best of us are wont to do—were in rebellion… in their case against the schmaltzy kind of newspaper “criticism” and reviews—especially of poetry—that preceded them. That schmaltzy stuff was all about praising the poet’s “sentiment” or good-heartedness, and it was more often than not aimed at women—the main writers and readers of “sentimental” novels and all-too-flowery and rhymy “verse.”
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 3, 2011
Image by takomabibelot via Flickr
First, some aphoristic opals:
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator.
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.” — William Blake
Image by Paul Dunleavy via Flickr
By Gary Corseri (with special thanks to A. Weiner!)
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2011
1. The Garden of Eden
Yo! A-man! Evie? Where U at?—G-D
Behind the bushes, Big Guy!—E.
What the? U hiding?—G-D
We’re naked, Lord!—A.
Whoa! Who tole u u were naked?—G-D
Duh! I thought u knew everything?—E.
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By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 12, 2011
Image by Ben Sutherland via Flickr
“Beware of these eyes. … I’m the devil in disguise.”
“Take all you can get… and give as little as possible.” — Mae West (in “I’m No Angel”)
Dear William and Kate,
A thousand apologies for this tardy response to your late-arriving invitation! (I must confess, after my first question, “Why me—a humble-as-kippers American poet?,” my second question was: “In this era of girdle-tightening austerity, why the gilded note; would some churls think that ‘bad form’?”)
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 29, 2011
Image by sbisson via Flickr
(for J.B.)
This one—tack-witted, sharp of tongue—
thinks he’ll die soon, and so,
smokes on (although he loves his wife).
He has made peace at 62 (my age)
with demons, destiny, and even
the C.O.P.D. that will
kick him in.
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 23, 2011
Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr
RAINBOW PIE: A Redneck Memoir, by Joe Bageant
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2010 (U.S. edition, 2011). 310 pp.
Reviewed by Gary Corseri
Lose all your troubles, kick up some sand
And follow me, buddy, to the Promised Land.
I’m here to tell you, and I wouldn’t lie,
You’ll wear ten-dollar shoes and eat rainbow pie. –“The Sugar Dumpling Line,” American hobo song.
“Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass,” writes Joe Bageant on page 2 of his second book, RAINBOW PIE.
By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 12, 2011
Image by mar is sea Y via Flickr
(for Bradley Manning)
“In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. … When my sons grow up…, O my friends…, I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing. …” –Socrates (from Plato’s Apologia)
For speaking truth to power… a cold cell.
Naked now…, and yet, they fear you!
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