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Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]
_______________________________________________________________ On Election Day I hear democracy weep, on election day. The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election…
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“November Graveyard” [by Sylvia Plath]
The scene stands stubborn: skinflint treesHoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turnTo elegiac dryads, and dour grassGuards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassinessHowever the grandiloquent mind may scornSuch poverty. No dead…
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What Really Happened: November 22, 1963 [by David Lehman]
Every year on this day I think unfailingly of three things: — that today is Hoagy Carmichael's birthday, which I imagine him celebrating quietly with a glass of bourbon as he tickles the ivories…
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“In 1976, When She Was Born” [a sonnet by Molly Arden]
Life was dull in 1976.Dad had to read "Ivanhoe" and write a report.Sex was not yet Mom’s favorite sport.The only rhyme that came to mind was "dicks." Mom was somewhere northof the Mass /…
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“Oak Hill, West Virginia” [by Mary Jo Salter)
OAK HILL, WEST VIRGINIA Robert Cooke, 1929-2017 “Great louts are necessaryat funerals,” Julian Barnes wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot,a book I had just read—in fact, it was in the carI’d parked at the cemetery— and so…
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“November” [by Robert Frost]
We saw leaves go to glory,Then almost migratoryGo part way down the lane,And then to end the storyGet beaten down and pastedIn one wild day of rain.We heard " 'Tis Over" roaring.A year of…
