Soul Patch by Elton Glaser

By Charles Rammelkamp

From the very cover of Elton Glaser’s Off the Grid Poetry Prize-winning new collection, you know you’re in for a cosmic ride. William Blake’s The Ancient Days adorns the front of the book, a design originally published as the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. It’s Blake’s Urizen, the embodiment of conventional reason and law, in Blake’s mythology, a naked, bearded old man who makes you think of God or Jupiter, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Glaser’s voice is likewise that of a prophet, albeit at times a wisecracking prophet.

God is all over the place in these poems. But Glaser is ever-skeptical. In “Devotional Smoke” he writes—

I’m praying again

To a God I don’t believe in.

I’m lighting candles like little spaceships

That will carry my pleas and complaints

To the black hole of heaven.

O Lord who does not exist,

I have read all the books about You,

Pages thick with miracles and fools…

.In one of those prayers, recited in “And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth,” Glaser pleads, “Lord, disinherit me. Father, / Take back your promises of dirt.” He goes on to spell out his disinclination for “salvation”:

. Father, you love the self-effacing types,

Bashful and subdued, demure as a debutante,

While I presume too much, believing

More in foreplay than the afterlife…

.The title poem begins similarly:

Gott in Himmel, I feel

No umbilical linkage to You.

I know the difference between a hawk and a hand job.

The very first poem in Soul Patch, “Not Ready for Our Close-Up,” has already set us up for the skepticism that follows throughout. The poem begins:

So here we are, helpless among the infinities,

Like noonday devils with the midnight blues.

Is this our time, between the harrowing and the harvesting?

We don’t think so, Sir, but you never know.

Lazarus (“Lament and Helpless Variations”) and Eve (“September During Wartime”) make cameo appearances. In “Proverbs from the Balkans” Glaser writes:

God may speak

In a hundred tongues, but in each ear

Old Scratch makes the translation.

As you might suspect, Satan has final say! The Devil whispers everything you want to hear. “Right As Rain” ends on the reflection:

Like you, I’ve been brung down by maybeitis and the iffity blues.

But I’m not just another slow learner sucking up to God.

It’s true, I’m from the South and given to unseemly ecstasies,

To that itchy music sweating all over a slinky beat.

Get down on the dance floor, mama, we’re going old school tonight.

It’s heaven by the back door, counting our salvation, sin by sin.

Sometimes Glaser’s verses have the comic force of a punchline – or a fortune cookie; cynical one-liners. “A man divided against himself cannot stand,” he writes, channeling Abe Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech in “The Old Polarities,” the final poem in the collection. “But he can sit down / With a good book and even better booze.” The epigraph to the second part of Soul Patch actually does come from a fortune cookie:

How can you have a beautiful ending

Without making beautiful mistakes?

In “Perpendiculars,” a series of aphorisms, he writes:

Like carpenter ants, we’re all

Busy building

The ruins around us.

and

No one minds, among the flowers

And their followers, that petals open

To the plundering bee.

Elton Glaser’s humor is self-effacing but in the manner of Socratic ignorance, which adds up to self-knowledge, recognizing your limitations. “Least Resistance” begins:

To count up all my faults, I’d need

The hands of a mutant, twelve fingers to a palm

And thumbs the size of Rhode Island. And even then,

A few small flaws might slip by,

Truants from the scroll of boners and regrets.

So many of his poems contain questions, like those of a prophet addressing his flock. “The Contemplative Life” is three stanzas, all of which end with unanswerable questions. “After the Evening News” is the same (“Is the night under new management?”). In “Seven Strolls without a Map,” also full of aphorisms, he notes: “Everything’s a mystery / If you stand too close to it.” But in “Cadenza with Blowtorch and Strong Wind Advisory,” Glaser asserts, “Between mystery and revelation, I’ll take mystery any time.” As Hamlet famously tells his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Or, as Glaser puts it more colorfully in “Hang a Left at the Beer-and-Bait”: “In the seesaw juju of the universe, lap and overlap, / I’m teased by the truth, like feathers on a fandancer.

With epigraphs from New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, from Sean Thomas Dougherty, whom Dorianne Laux has called “the gypsy punk heart of American poetry,” a poem in the voice of Robert Desnos, the Surrealist poet who died in a Nazi death camp – not to mention William Blake – it’s clear where Glaser’s influences come from. One of my favorites is “Proving Ground,” one of his flâneur poems, just walking about in America, this one through an art museum (“The hand of the artist, thin brush / Like the fingertip of God, poises in midair to replenish the punishments”). It takes its epigraph from Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”: Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial.

As one might suspect, given Glaser’s surreal, Ashbery-esque influences, it’s damn near impossible at times to follow his logic in these captivating poems, but the cynical gist – the skeptical voice – is loud and clear, the refusal to accept simple answers. But even as he discredits simple faith, “In an age of rancor and bewilderment, despair in spades,” the poem title from which this line comes assures us, “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show.”

Often Glaser’s philosophical reflections are spurred by the season, the month. “Operators Are Standing By to Take Your Call” begins:

Late sunlight on the dogwood leaves, goldfinch

At the seed feeder, and on the radio

Some salty guitar, slow licks going down on the blues—

It’s June all over again, that halfway month between

The rain of spring and the ruin of summer.

I enter each evening like no man’s land.

“Muddling Through,” on the other hand, winds up:

Here it’s February, where the spirit dies, land of relentless snow

With a bony wind that enables it, and no room for alibis or complaint.

“Helium Horizon” takes a different turn, opening with:

The mood I’m in, you’d have to bomb the power plants

To dim me down. And why not? It’s April,

The trees spring-loaded with a nervous light.

“October Proposals” begins: “Let’s sue the trees for lack of affection.” “Already it’s November of the crippled oaks, / Cold month the flies crawl over,” he observes in “After the Evening News.”

Death is another theme that gets its time in the spotlight. “Mortropolis” is one poem (“What city do I live in? I live in // Atrocity, among / The strangled, the backbroke, the disemboweled…”). “Exit Music,” about suicide (“Some hang themselves from a question mark”), is another:

Across the table, Death deals out the cards—

Death, with his poker face, and no need to bluff.

America itself is another recurring theme, ruminations on elections, Independence Day, the ethos of the nation. With his characteristic wit and wordplay, he writes in “The Old Polarities”:

I’m from America,

Land of the Spree, home of the depraved.

Prophets speak in riddles. Maybe that’s because there are no simple answers – no simple questions. As Elton Glaser asks in “Have It Your Way,” what’s “More human than the need for lies / We can argue into truth.” Soul Patch is a book that stays with you, haunting your idle thoughts.

You can find the book here: https://www.grid-books.org/soul-patch

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, has just been published by Kelsay Books.

Bladed Edge Between by Ruby Singh

By Greg Bem

No matter where the fault lines
the undertow still believes

(from “Five Rivers,” page 3)

Ruby Singh’s Bladed Edge Between is a wondrous and wonderful collection of poetry aided by its many parts alongside the sum. A splintering of fragments of beauty and wisdom, this is a book that feels light and dense harmoniously. Many of the poems are short and the fragments of inspiration are event shorter, and when stacked upon one another, form dizzying works of contemplation and an exploratory, open aesthetic.

Marveling at the book’s four sections, which contain a mixture of English and Punjabi, what is clear across the book is the centering of family and the familial. The collection’s many cast of characters is a painted web of words. In most cases, the reader may not be distinctly and directly connected to the people in the poet’s life, but we get a sense of intimacy and relationship nonetheless.

Barefoot to blades of grass
a mother’s knowing allows them room to grow
each of them held by the earth’s understanding

(from “The Clouds Stood as Giants,” page 42)

Singh’s speaker also serves as an incredible conduit, offering a duality of external and internal, of the self and the greater, global whole. Perspective shifts become arousing as the world is at once within and beyond, discernable and yet impossible to fully fathom. That is where the awe lies, that is where the poet dwells. Incremental images across the book form a pathway or solve a puzzle of disorganization and chaos. The book, with its many openings, portals, fragmented offerings, takes such chaos and fury of the world and transfers it, transitions it into the oneness of Singh’s poetics.

Lend your ear to the needle in the sky,
the clouds are composing hymns for you to hear

(from “Needle in the Sky,” page 9)

Often Singh’s marvelousness is composed of simple things, objects, and images which, when repositioned, become holy, become spiritual, become loud and soft, a homing in, a bellowing, a beckoning. These are the images that surround most of us, these are the words that we find comforting. They become empowering and lifting with their poetic configuration. Metaphors beget literal circumstance, puzzles beget clarity. This is the poet’s cycle, this is the poet’s expression.

Often the “blade” of the voice is one that takes the expression and flips it, transmutes it into something radically new, undoubtedly fantastical. This is the blade that cuts, that chops, that chips away at the core, that moves the fragment of image to the fragment of the language at its purest moments, its individual words and sounds spinning into forms of illumination, future simplicities that cascades down the page like drops.

Night-born / my corner / seven hollows / my skull
Fill them / salt water / pull me, undertow still

(from “Sleepless,” page 56)

And yet we have access, we have Singh’s voice calming and pressing gently forward, ever so swift to pull the cut language into new positions, arranged to make sense, to make sensation, to make the world a sensical place, one that is truth through word, logic thought through, bite by bite, edge by edge.

Bladed Edge Between is not to be missed, for its many opportunities and beginnings that transfer the reader into new minds, new spaces of mind, new mindedness, new newness across our shared reality with all of its occupants.

You can find the book here:

Publisher link

Greg Bem is a poet, publisher and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com. Carbonation Press Foray for The Arts Talus Field

The dog scowls instead of biting by Joseph Farley

By Lynette G. Esposito

Joseph Farly’s The dog scowls instead of biting is a little twisty in concept and in the execution of themes dealing with death, survival and choices in this sixty-seven-page paperback published by Alien Buddha Press. In the poem Hardy Har Har on page nineteen the narrator opens the poem with:

We shall laugh our way to the funeral home,

and from there to ashes and dirt.

The wry sense of humor addressing a trip to the funeral home adds a snarky tone and arrogance about the inevitable last trip one takes toward eternity. The poem has five couplets that progress towards interesting illusions and concludes in the final two lines with:

And we are taught not to burst into giggles

when more dignified people enter the room.

What a way to laugh at death. Using slang as a title–Hardy Har Har—skillfully suggests a disrespect for the formality of facing one’s own demise and the separation from the youthful belief in their own immortality and the reality of the nervous giggling when more dignified people enter the room. Farley uses a similar irreverent approach in the poem Upgrading on page twenty-three:

I no longer seek the grail.

I’ll settle for the bottle,

a few friends that shout

at the game on the screen,

and a bartender who is

generous and worthy

of every tip you leave.

Although the poem is a slim, almost skinny seven line one stanza verse, it sets time, place, and a philosophical perspective that is easy to understand. The title suggests this is a better place and choice than where the narrator has been, He has upgraded from searching for the holy grail (faith) for friends in the local bar. The skillful compaction technique is also seen in the one stanza poem Dog Days on page forty-eight:

Dogs certainly have their day,

A dog can chew up a whole calendar

and have its choice of dates.

Meanwhile we’ve got our 9 to 5

that makes all days seem the same.

Tomorrow I will ask the boss

for a few more Saturdays in the month.

Maybe I’ll have them sprinkled in the gruel

While I stand at her desk, bowl in hand.

Suggesting a dog has better choices and can pick any date on a calendar is interesting but not particularly fresh, The reference to Oliver Twist is what gives this poem its sense of hope, and courage to ask for more, I find this reference successful but with a light touch so those not familiar with Great Expectations can feel (probably from experience) the stress of being constrained by an authority figure and the need for the job that is not fulfilling. Farley has fine tuned the skill of saying less but suggesting more. When you read his poems, you need to peel back the layers and let the subtlety free. The relationships Farley has presented through the book between what is expected and what is reality rather than Illusion is interesting. The voice in the poems is honest and probing.

The dog scowls instead of biting can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/dog-scowls-instead-biting/dp/B0FSY14SZY .

Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University, Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University. She has been published in Poetry Quarterly, Sheepshead Review, Self, 50 Haikus, Front Porch, Glass Post, and others. Lynette was married to Attilio Esposito and lives in Southern New Jersey with her feline muses.

THE WHIRLPOOL BATH BY AUSTIN ALEXIS

By Thaddeus Rutkowski

At a birthday party for artist and writer Anthony Haden-Guest, I was given a copy of a poem by Austin Alexis. I read the poem later, and much later realized it is in Alexis’s collection The Whirlpool Bath, from Kelsay Books. The poem, “Eclipse Watch,” reads in its entirety:

In daytime, darkness pools around us.

We gather to watch,

bewitched by our own ritual.

We swim in shadow’s ocean.

Daylight survives

and we stand minuscule

in immensity.

This poem—with its internal rhyme, apt metaphor, and paradox—perfectly describes the rare alignment of moon and sun. But it also comments on life, and what comes after. It allows us to glimpse the arrival of unnatural darkness, but this isn’t a finality, for “daylight survives.” Not only for those of us here on earth, but perhaps for those no longer here, those who continue to exist in memory or in some other realm. Alexis says, in another poem, “A Buddha,” that he has a tiny statue of the religious teacher on his kitchen windowsill. Perhaps that small figure signifies a belief that there is more than what we can see here on this earth.

While the poems in the collection range over topics such as friendship, travels, and sex—as well as death—I was drawn to the pieces that cover early trauma. In “The Barber,” a poem near the beginning of the book, the poet recalls a haircut he got as a boy:

He knew what he was doing

as he pressed his crotch into my knee.

Posed as if by a choreographer,

I failed to stir or speak.

Out of my right eye’s corner

I caught his neutral-looking stare

at my scalp’s dark hair.

The experience has receded in memory, but the mature poet wonders if he should “continue to worry about that day, or . . . forgive. The answer isn’t clear, and we are left wondering how, if we’d been in that chair, we would process the experience. The barber, of course, could be any adult taking advantage of a kid. Perhaps the answer is a mixture of worry and forgiveness, with a dose of anger.
“Misconduct,” the next poem in the book, is more graphic, as it describes a high-school principal exposing himself to the poet, a twenty-four-year-old substitute teacher. The poem ends with these lines:

. . . maybe that episode has damaged the way I relate

to bosses, to all authority figures, real or imagined,

pastors, presidents, prime ministers—

not to mention workdays, shut doors—

and even potential lovers.

This is strong, heady stuff, not for children. It is a forceful warning to those who would harass children—or young adults. The effects linger for a lifetime.

Lessons can be learned from every poem here—about how to live, how to perceive, and how to behave. Alexis pulls no punches, and though his words are brief they ring true. One can expect no more—and no less—from good poetry.You can find the book here: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/the-whirlpool-bath

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of eight books, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions (New Meridian Arts). He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and at a YMCA. He received a NY Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Best Small Fictions award

Visual Chords by Jianqing Zheng

By Allison Wiltshire

Part I of Jianqing Zheng’s poetry collection Visual Chords begins with this famous line from Dorthea Lange: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Certainly, this epigraph captures Zheng’s skill in visual ekphrasis, his poetry serving as a darkroom for the imagination where the images Zheng views are fully processed and examined. However, I would argue that Visual Chords achieves much more than merely transcribing what is seen; it excavates and explores new dimensions of sight, probing into the stilled fixedness of snapshots, drawing out of those isolated moments movement, sound, and histories that give a soul to the stagnation of still frames and portraits.

As the title of the collection suggests, the power of Zheng’s poetry—written in a plethora of forms, from haiku, to concrete, to free verse—lies in his ability to create dissonant “chords” through which disparate realities are not merely juxtaposed but brilliantly interlaced. Every subject in the foreground of the images Zheng views is woven with a photographic negative in Zheng’s poetry. For example, one of the most prominent themes throughout the pictures Zheng describes is a sense of aimlessness or unsureness regarding the future. This drifting trope is present most overtly in both the mobile nature of Zheng’s subjects, his poetry spanning a variety of regions and countries, covering portraits captured from the Mississippi Delta and the American Southwest to New York and Paris, and in several poems throughout the collection that analyze disadvantaged subjects with ambiguous futures. A number of these poems revolve around Lange’s Great Depression photographs. In “Standing Hunger,” for instance, Zheng examines White Angel Breadline, a photo of a line of people outside a soup kitchen. Zheng imagines the thoughts of the main subject of the photograph. He writes, “What / will tomorrow be? / depressing / as the lead sky hanging / overhead? Is there / a forecast for it?” (8). This uncertainty echoes Zheng’s descriptions in “Escape,” as he illustrates a homeless family plodding down a seemingly never-ending road in search of a chance for survival. And, Zheng examines the thoughts of the mother in Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, writing, “But life isn’t a painting / and migration isn’t resurrection when they / crowd under a shabby tent on this pea farm / in the middle of nowhere, trying to find a way” (12). This theme of uncertain destiny resonates often throughout the book, in descriptions of such stuck-in-limbo subjects as Taos Junction refugees and Japanese concentration camp internees.

Despite these recurrences of figures who appear adrift and directionless, however, Zheng doesn’t leave Visual Chords fixated on the anxiety of indeterminate fate. Instead, such anxiety meets resistance, in poetry that finds joy and strength even in that unsureness. Where the way forward is hazy and the only clear road is a “worn path” called memory, Zheng illuminates resilience in the ex-slave woman who stares down that road she has trodden, her memories of pain fueling her resolve “to wobble forward” (3). And where the stillness of photographs may, at first glance, cause their subjects to appear stuck in a state of lifeless dejection, the shiftiness of the future, reflected in the wind that becomes a kinetic thread throughout Zheng’s poems, spurs animation, even sentience. Through shaky gusts, corn and other “flat life of the flatland” dances (40), and leaves morph into butterflies (70). This poetic call and response, this friction Zheng creates between the bleakness at the forefront of the photographs and the hope he extracts from beneath the surface of those images, is the anthem of this collection. Upon viewing Pallbearers Carrying the Coffin #0010, Zheng says, “I’ll see your death and raise you caskets swinging to jazz beats” (60). To pictures of landscapes often imagined too impoverished for excitement, the Mississippi Delta’s climate thought too intolerably hot for life to thrive, Zheng answers with lightheartedness, enlivening even the sun to play cowboy, to wear a bandanna and “[swing] a lasso of light” (31).

Amidst these continual subversions of the overt mystifying sadness or harrowing bewilderment that may be initially assumed upon seeing many of the images examined in this collection, Zheng shatters the biggest illusion of all—the seemingly clear-cut binary between the observed and the observer. This meta-ekphrastic approach through which Zheng breaks the fourth wall is multifaceted. At times, Zheng smudges the line between the portraits and their spectators even while illustrating that divide with flashing arrows. After describing a royal portrait of Queen Victoria with young King Edward VIII, Queen Mary, and Queen Alexandra, for example, Zheng reels the reader back into the present with a humorous juxtaposition against the nobility of the portrait: “hot noon / a little boy asks his dad / for a fried popsicle” (19). By conjoining the history the portrait captures with the present experience of viewing, or dismissing, that portrait, Zheng creates a jarring contrast that metaphorically smashes both the frame of the portrait and the frame through which we view history’s tales of inherited power and authority, effectively, and amusingly, trivializing the portrait’s royal subjects and titles as less significant than a child’s passing thought of a snack.

But, in other moments, Zheng more blatantly rejects the partitioning of photographic subjects and their onlookers, blending the past and present with such verve that the speaker, the present viewer and poetic conveyer of the photographs, is repeatedly inserted into the narratives Zheng creates around the portraits—narratives that give backstories, personalities, even names to the people who live in the static scenes. Writing of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s shot of kids watching a Parisian puppet show, Zheng writes, “I’m the boy stopping his ears as grandma tells me the / tale of the headless horseman at bedtime (17). It’s one of many moments in which the speaker of Zheng’s poem is made into an active contributor to the history of the picture, either as a captured figure in the photograph or the person behind the camera. The impact of this transfiguration of the speaker from external examiner to internal participant achieves Zheng’s overarching vision for the entire collection—one that sees all 360 degrees of the pictures and uses harmonious and dissonant “chords” of visual art and poetry to capture the world and its history in ways photographs and paintings can never convey alone.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Chords-Jianqing-Zheng/dp/1965412254

Allison Wiltshire is an assistant professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. She studies African diaspora literature, her recent work analyzing African and African American representations of twins and the Mississippi Delta. Most recently, her work has appeared in Valley Voices: A Literary Review and Early American Literature.

of an octopus: an archite|x|ual awareness of words by Diane Sahms

A groundbreaking journey into the living architecture of language….

What Others Say:

The poems here know they are being looked at. They look back. They behave as experiments on the border between physics and lyric, where hue is both property and proposition. Typography becomes topography becomes choreography, the book rehearses its own body. The philosophical center lies near “—L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Game,” where a single word is dismantled for parts till what remains is a question of measure itself: how one counts what touches them, and how the instrument changes the sum. To read is to feel the small economies of attention by which perception pays for meaning. The book trusts the reader to hold a scene to reveal its interval, the exact space between reach and grasp, through poems that are lucid devices for perceiving, but also tender, and their tenderness comes from the work they make the eye do and from the permission they grant the mind—to stand inside a form until the form begins to think back.

—Daniel Carden Nemo, Editor-in-Chief of Amsterdam Review.

A groundbreaking journey into the living architecture of language, —of an octopus: an archite|x|ual awareness of words invites readers to witness poetry as a conscious, self-aware art form. Diane Sahms blends visual form, color, and text into an innovative poetic landscape where each poem becomes a vibrant, breathing entity—aware of itself and the reader.

From color-infused wordscapes to concrete and conceptual poetry, Sahms explores the intersections of music, art, philosophy, and human emotion, crafting a shared space of poetic consciousness. Each page is a visual and linguistic experiment, where words shape themselves like sculptures, dance like music, or dissolve into abstract imagery.

This collection challenges traditional boundaries, offering an immersive experience that awakens the senses and redefines what poetry can be—a kaleidoscopic dialogue between reader and poem, alive with possibility and meaning.

—Michael Hathaway, Publisher, Chiron Review

You can find the book here: https://www.carbonationpress.com/catalog-2/019-octopus

For review copies contact: Greg Bem at Carbonation Press –

[email protected]

Or Diane Sahms at: [email protected]

Last Call ….

And So This is Winter….. Submit Your Poems

So, this is winter in all of its beauty, of snow-covered streets, hills and valleys. Of living objects becoming ice sculptures, of sun and sun glint, of majestic gray clouds and clear star filled skies. It is winter in all of its beauty and of course the darkness of early morning and arrival of night in the afternoon. In this time of governmental chaos let us look onto nature, the beauty and ugliness of its arrival displayed in all our lives. It is in the upturns and downturns of nature we find hope and even in the darkness, the beauty of the earth and all that surrounds us.

Send three to five poems with, a short 3^rd person bio for consideration of publication in our newest online, North of Oxford’s – And So This is Winter… Anthology.

Send to [email protected] no later than January 30^th for consideration of publication. We look forward to hearing from you.

Poem Talk 214- Tom Devaney

PoemTalk episode 214 is now out!

Ernest Hilbert, Guy D’Annolfo, and Larry Robin joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House to talk about three poems from Thomas Devaney’s Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019): “The Blue Stoop,” “Oregon Avenue,” and “A Week in the Childhood of W.C. Fields.”

Here’s the link to the audio and program notes:

https://jacket2.org/podcasts/game-always-poemtalk-214

Remembering….

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Martin Luther King Jr. – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate