Poetry on the Page and the Screen by Jim Kalmbach
The stethoscope tells what everyone fears: You’re likely to go on living for years, With a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper, And the style of your prose growing limper and limper. by Theodore Roethke About the Reading Some time in the mid seventies, while I was a doctoral student in the English Department at Michigan State University, … Read more
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A bird is not a dog. How could I be so confused? Standing in line at Ace hardware, the people around me are astonished: “A bird could be a dinosaur, a door bell, a down vest,” they explain, “but a bird is not a dog; moreover, a marriage is not a relationship, a family is not a classroom, a minivan is not a skateboard. How … Read more
My daughter and her husband leave today for a delayed honeymoon in Japan. And I am thinking back to sixteen years ago when she graduated from high school a semester early and took a three-month tour, by herself, of the Far East. While she was away, I discovered a mosaic of the Pacific Rim built … Read more
One year all three of my children attended the same elementary school: my youngest in morning kindergarten, my daughter in third grade, and my first born in sixth. Almost every morning, we would walk the quarter mile to school: three children, two hands; mostly they talked happily and ignored me. That was a rare time, … Read more
At the end of the play, you hear your name and as you rise, the bell chimes. You take the quill and pretend to write your name and then stand in a corner as more names are called and the bell chimes louder. 1776 was my introduction to community theatre. The director, Sally Parry, needed … Read more