These are the poems submitted to the poetry contest. I am soliciting the votes of all readers not related to the contestants. The only contestants eligible for the prizes are those who were in attendance, but I also welcome comments on the contributions of Travis Berg and Asa Plinch
Reading an account of Oprah Winfrey hectoring the horde of Democrats and mocking cat ladies, I thought to look up the celebrities who addressed the Republican Convention.
When I ask people about candidates they support–and why–they usually respond by praising their position of abortion or taxes or foreign policy. When I probe further and ask what, for example, J.D. Vance has done to limit abortion, they cite some speech he has given or a position paper, To quote the godfather of Beat poets, “The thing is, they never learn.”
It is a truism of political analysts that while most Americans say they do not trust the members of Congress, they tend to trust their own representative. This is a bizarre dichotomy.
We are often reminded that “There is not only no such thing as a free lunch.” This is true in one sense, since, while I may get my lunch free by robbing the restaurant or blackmailing the proprietor or extorting money fraudulently that enables me to spend other people’s money on lunch, but then the restaurant or my victims are paying for the lunch.
The Greeks’ love of competition and conflict is only the reverse side of their strong attachment to friends (including family) and community. These attachment were also a source of the great joy took in creating and celebrating beauty: They loved singing dancing, recitation of heroic poetry, parades, sacrifices and barbecues. All these pleasures were available at the great games
This post is extracted from the unpolished script for a subscription podcast series that should begin by the end of 2024.
Simple conversations, jobs, more present tense (andare), and the days of the week.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Olympics for years. It. has been a long time since the Games were a genuine amateur sport. All my life they have been big business that guaranteed endorsements and jobs to the winners. When the allowed professional basketball players in, it was a public declaration that they were giving up the pretense.
I’ve been in 15th century Florence, to be precise, colloguing with Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli, and others. As a traveler in time and space, I was eager to share my thoughts on the American present, which for them is an unimaginably distant future.
