MAYBE MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF ALL (FOR WALT WHITMAN'S BIRTHDAY)

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..."
—Walt Whitman (from the preface to the 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS)

NEXT SUNDAY

I'll be reading a few poems as will a gang of terrific Jersey poets, Sunday June 4th, from 1 to 3, at The Artful Bean, 400 South Jefferson Street, Orange NJ, $5 at the door.

MEMORIAL DAY REMINDER

Just a reminder that Memorial Day is meant to honor those in the military who died "defending the country" (though in too many cases it was defending big money and big business), not all veterans.

But to my mind it should honor all those who died in any unnecessary way, as civilians caught in the crossfire or under the indiscriminate bombs, or from lack of health care, or from poverty, or starvation, or any condition or circumstance that could be altered were the resources devoted to it.

And as a reminder of the code I do my best to live up to, though I too often fail (and to honor the heroes who lost their lives trying to stop that white supremacist terrorist in Portland a few days ago), here is what I requested be written on the cake for my 75th birthday celebration:

FAVORITE MEMORIAL DAY EVE QUOTE

TIMMY LALLY GOING FOR IT

This is my grandnephew Timmy who moved to L.A. a few years ago from Maryland to try to make it as a comic. If you watch to the end he gives a pretty smooth set that had me laughing.

DENIS JOHNSON R.I.P.

I only knew Denis Johnson briefly, while he and I were at The University of Iowa Writers Workshop back in the late 1960s. I liked him and he seemed to like me. We talked some and were friendly, but not hang-out friends. He was eight years my junior and I was married with one child and another on the way.

The most vivid memory I have of him then was at a protest against recruiters from DOW Chemical, the makers of napalm, the petroleum based jelly bombs dropped from "American" planes that stuck to clothes and skin and burned innocent and "guilty" alike. Or maybe it was Marine recruiters, I no longer remember (though there are newspaper articles and photos in my archives at NYU that could verify which it was).

A bunch of pro-Viet War jocks attacked the front lines of the protesters blocking entrance to a university building, and I remember Denis's innocent, boyish face as the jocks punched and kicked us, trying to create a break in the line, but we held firm. Eventually the police arrived and arrested the protesters, not the jocks, typical of those times, and these.

This photo (unattributed on the site I found it on) doesn't capture the Denis I knew back then who was  around twenty at the time, slim and like I said, boyish. He was quiet and undemonstrative to my boisterous radical persona, so I assumed he found me a lot to respond to. But I let him know how much I liked his writing already, and was happy when years later he and I had poetry collections published by the same elegant small press run by the late Kim Merker—The Stone Wall Press.

At this stage of my life I'm trying to reduce the things in my life, even my precious library, so last year I sold some of it to a rare book dealer and friend who took that book of Denis's—A Man Among The Seals—that I had held close for all these decades. I missed it as soon as I let it go. I know there are many who will miss Denis, who was taken too soon from family, friends and fans. But he left a great legacy of great books, which is what any writer would want.

THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY

Me in my baptismal "dress" not long after I was born seventy-five years ago today. Sitting on my mother's lap surrounded by my father and brothers and sisters. All gone except for my sister Irene over my right shoulder in the photo. We're still here. All of them still with us.