By Judi Curry
My 13 year old Golden is having some hip issues
Trying to watch him walk down the stairs brings out the crying tissues.
He doesn’t seem to be in much pain and he “smiles” all the time,
Except when he tries to stand up and then you know he’s not fine.
He just helped me “dog sit” my daughter’s big dog,
Who really is a cross between a kangaroo and a frog.
By Will Falk
I am looking for a pick-axe
a long one with a thick handle
one to chip my way
through the asphalt covering
everything
I want to hear crickets
tall grasses at my heels
the shift of sand
the suck of mud
starlight
this is what I think about
wandering San Diego at night [Read more…]
The poet’s secret pact
By Anna Daniels
Brent Beltrán is the Wednesday editor du jour, so I gave him a heads up yesterday that Bukowski’s poem would be ready to post today. Brent shot back an email with “In honor of Bukowski I’ll get blindingly drunk and bang my head on the keyboard in hopes that a poem appears on my computer screen.” I sense that the man who wrote “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can” would approve of the homage.
Much of Charles Bukowski’s poetry expresses his contempt of hypocrisy, willful stupidity, gratuitous judgments, posturings of superiority and the easy sell-out. [Read more…]
Poet as memorist
By Anna Daniels
It’s National Poetry Month and readers have been sending in their requests for poems and poets. Securing publication rights for the poem of the day has been challenging, which is one of the reasons why I am using videos. Many of you have been sending videos links which means I have enjoyed hours and hours of total immersion in all kinds of poems by all kinds of poets. You have introduced me to poets I never knew about or poems by familiar poets that I had never read before. Don’t stop! Thanks to Anna Prouty for suggesting Elegy. [Read more…]
By Anna Daniels
Patti Smith, the queen of punk and one of the few women who was even able to make a name for herself in the punk scene, is now in her late 60’s, still writing, singing and politically active. Piss Factory was one of her first recordings, released in 1974.
Sixteen and time to pay off
I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe
Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week
But it’s a paycheck, Jack.
It’s so hot in here, hot like Sahara
You could faint in the heat…
The rest of the poem here. [Read more…]
By Shadab Zeest Hashmi/ UniVerse
A guard forces you to urinate on yourself
Another barks out louder than his dog
the names of your sisters
who live in the delicate nest
of a ruby-throated hummingbird
Each will be a skeleton he says
Was there someone who gave you
seven almonds for memory,
a teaspoon of honey every morning? [Read more…]
By Karen Kenyon
Why I Write
My mother was a pianist, so I grew up surrounded by music and lyrics. In addition,my blind grandfather wrote poems all the time, so writing poetry and being creative seemed a natural thing to do.
During college years I was an Art Major at UNM in Albuquerque (until I married after 3 years). But it was really after something difficult happened that poetry really entered my life full force.
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
Editor’s Note: San Diego Free Press contributor and poet Karen Kenyon has introduced readers to a number of San Diego poets. One of the iron-clad rules of poetry is that one poet always leads to another. Ish, as we know him, is one of those poets. Since SDFP’s launch in 2012 he has contributed both poems and essays. A few months ago he attended one of our contributor and editor meetings and told us that he has been combining videos with his poetry. The ongoing SDFP series Geo-Poetic Spaces arose from that meeting.
As part of our National Poetry Month coverage, we have asked San Diego poets who contribute to SDFP to provide some insight into why they write poetry. Ish responded: Poetry is breathing. I write because I can’t hold my breath for long without exhaling words. I have to create. For me art is not just a way of living it is life.
The Spruce Street Bridge
Wind strumming up chords
Strolling over Spruce Street bridge
Nasturtiums swaying
Canyon suspending sound’s scent
A suite for strings struck in steel [Read more…]
The Poet as Mentor and Model
By Staff
A poet’s audience often includes other poets. If you want to write good poetry, you need to read good poetry and a lot of it. Then you need to read more. It’s not just about the writing. Poet and short story writer Aafa Michael Weaver wrote this about Lucille Clifton:
Rooted in that vernacular consciousness and endowed with an encompassing intelligence and supremely keen intuition, Lucille was also as originally American as the blues and jazz. She resisted the homage to western tradition with its Athenian origins. In her work, antiquity is African but not Afro-centric. In the distinctness of her poetic project she gave us a black woman’s confessional lyric that is as celestial as it is earthbound. She wrote openly of the female body, openly and defiantly, and she wrote about the pressurized space of a black woman as a survivor of childhood trauma. In doing so she gave me a model that would take me two decades to know, and the process of “knowing” is the key to that pressurized space. … “Two Puffy Afros Going Down the Road: On Lucille Clifton’s Influence,” The California Journal of Poetics. [Read more…]
By Will Falk
Editor’s Note: Will Falk contacted San Diego Free Press back in December of 2013. He wrote that he had recently moved to San Diego and was interested in submitting essays and poetry. Since that first contact it is unusual for a week to go by without receiving a submission from Will in one genre or the other. His essays have attracted a wide readership; they are often picked up on reddit and reposted on other sites. It is often harder however for poets to discern the extent and nature of the audience for their poems. So we asked Will why his first passion is to write poetry. His response is in his poet’s manifesto below. This is Not a Poem follows.
First, there’s sunshine, clouds, empty skies, and lightning storms. First, there’s wind kissing your breast, chills chapping your lips, and dew on your sleeping bag before the dawn. First, there’s salmon swimming upstream, heron stalking bluegill, and grizzly bear brothers wrestling. First, there’s quick clean water chasing over pebbles, ice cracking under a spring sun, and sand dragging over desert floors. [Read more…]
By Doug Porter
Congressman Scott Peters and seventeen other Democrats responded to the clarion call of the dirty food lobby last week by joining with House Republicans in their 55th attempt to to scale back or repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Following intensive lobbying and publicity events by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (hotels won’t be able to provide 24 hour service any more) and the National Restaurant Association (we’ll simply cut employee hours) the House of Representatives voted last week 248 to 179 to change the law’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours.
A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says about one million people would lose employer-backed coverage and the number of uninsured would climb by nearly 500,000 if the law’s work definitions were changed. [Read more…]
By Anna Daniels
During National Poetry Month, San Diego Free Press will be publishing a poem of the day. San Diego has poets, some very familiar and others not so familiar. We will be posting their works on Saturday and Sunday, while you are enjoying late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.
During the week we will draw upon poetry from other places and times. Thursdays however, are reserved for Ishmael von Heindrick- Barnes video/poem series for SDFP called Geo-Poetic Spaces. We will also keep our eyes open for poems from SDFP contributor Will Falk.
Today we bring you Octavio Paz. The one hundredth anniversary of Octavio Paz’s birth was this past March 31st. The Mexican born poet was a prolific poet and essayist. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. [Read more…]
