Still from ‘Thy Kingdom Come,’ produced by Beyond the Trees. Artists can be up to many things, but I have always been drawn to those who bear witness. “Poetry begins with listening,” says poet Sean Singer. In this role the artist is a sort of Quan…
Creative writing programs in universities often host visiting writers and poets for public readings, student manuscript consultations, and class visits. As an undergraduate I organized the visit of Gwendolyn Brooks (and her husband, Henry Blakely, Jr., who demanded to know what poetry I, a mere proser, was working on). As…
Standing Rock disappeared from mainstream media in the daily deluge of political scandals and outre behavior. But Native Americans had predicted that sparks from Oceti Sakowin’s sacred fire would be carried around the earth, and they could be seen in other Indigenous camps and movements that resisted the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, and the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mt. Mauna Kea.
Photo by John Griswold Maybe you have had a cat like our Abbey—everything on her terms, selective in her affections, so distant she seemed half-wild, but firmly part of the family. We adopted her and her “brother” at the same time, when our sons were little. We found…
Everybody and everything around us are hurtling through time together, so we often experience a relative stillness as we age, just as we stretch and yawn hurtling through space at 872,000 miles per hour. If you ever wondered why Great Uncle Gus fails to register the…
Jean-Marc Côté, circa 1900, from series ‘En L’An 2000,’ courtesy Françoise Foliot, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Technological innovation is tricky. Flying cars, sure, we know what to do: get a car, add wings and a propeller. But put a magnetron in a metal box and use it to hyper-excite…
Screenshot from ‘Oleg’s Choice,’ Java Films Oleg’s Choice: A Personal Look at the Conflict in Ukraine (Java Films, 2016) is an insightful profile of two young Russian men, Oleg and Max, who volunteered to fight without pay in the Donbas after conflict erupted there in 2014. It…
Soldiers from the Minnesota Army National Guard on an exercise with British, Polish, and Lithuanian forces, in the Suwalki Gap in southern Lithuania, 2017. The Gap has been called the new Fulda Gap. (Photo courtesy of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Minnesota Army National Guard Public…
An eyewitness account of the end of the engrossing first act of the Standing Rock movement.
So many people got involved, for so many different reasons, that protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline was (nearly) a blank template. This gave many opportunities for conflict and few firm measures of success, except oil never flowing in the pipeline.
Screenshot from video said to be shot by Snake Island guards, on social media The bravery and devotion to duty of the small State Border Guard Service garrison on Snake [Zmiinyi] Island, an outpost of Ukrainian territorial boundaries in the Black Sea, has been much on social media.
Courtesy Corey Coyle, CC 3.0 Unported For a time, back in the Reagan-Bush era, I was a teen employee in a Hardee’s in coal country. By incompetence I had failed upward, away from the fry station and off the backline, to work the front counter, and then that…