… Don Share — Matador Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There are people who aren't getting what they need from journalism alone, or from social media alone, or from various other sources of information. They find that they need to go beyond the information into something deeper, something that's more illuminating and consoling, and that's where poetry falls right in, just as it always has.
Or, as William Carlos Williams put it:
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. This is a bittersweet 4th of July holiday, as my father died ten years ago, and I find myself thinking of him more and more with each passing year. I often wonder what he would think of the man I have become over the past ten years. My eulogy at his funeral did not fully capture the towering presence he was in my life, and he remains so in death. My pastor Al Sturgeon passed along this wonderful song from Chet Atkins that beautifully captures my feelings: