Arizona: The New Nuremberg
In 1935, Nazi Germany instituted the Nuremberg Race Laws that basically deprived German Jews their rights as citizens and demoted them to "subjects." Jews were banned from marrying anyone of the...
View ArticleIllness and Love
I've been ill lately; my body at times seems to belong to someone much older (at least in my head I'm still an awkward teen who longs for love but will settle for groping in a darkened theater--the...
View ArticleProposition 8 and Constitutional and Historical Awareness
Months of the year have unique historical or emotional associations for some of us. For example, ever since I was an elementary school student, August is the month that forever mushrooms over Hiroshima...
View ArticleElizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station": Word Choices, Sounds, and Silences
Filling StationOh, but it is dirty!--this little filling station,oil-soaked, oil-permeatedto a disturbing, over-allblack translucency.Be careful with that match!Father wears a dirty,oil-soaked monkey...
View ArticleNotes on Writers and the Teaching of Writing, I.
I.Those of us who've been formally trained as writers, who've been the beneficiaries of writing workshops taught by respected practitioners who discuss issues of craft line by line, syllable by...
View ArticleAmerica's Dysfunctional Soul
With each election cycle, the American populace is literally pummeled by political advertisements that often promote greed, hatred, selfishness, and xenophobia--and done so with ever-increasing degrees...
View ArticleSatan's Billboards
Along a stretch of Highway 198 just west of Hanford, CA, a billboard proclaims a message supposedly from Satan (he asks people to avoid a certain religious group). Obviously, Lucifer didn't pay for...
View ArticleMFAs are Terminal Degrees (Even at Two-Year Colleges)
Years ago I passed up two opportunities to accept tenure-track professor positions in English/Creative Writing at two universities, in part because I thought I could have an equally positive impact at...
View ArticleGood News: Eduardo C. Corral has won the Yale Younger Series of Poets Prize
Some of you are aware of Eduardo C. Corral's poetry and his always interesting blog, Lorcaloca. However, what some of you might not be aware of is that Eduardo has just won the Yale Younger Series of...
View ArticleNotes on Writers and the Teaching of Writing, II.
II.In Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Joan Didion notes that she learned how to write sentences by reading and analyzing Ernest Hemingway's sentences: "When I was fifteen or...
View ArticleMy Brando Died
My dog Brando, born in April 1996, died today, May 19, in the early morning hours as I slept next to him.He was Mary's dog ("Our little boy," she would say), but I inherited him when she passed away in...
View ArticlePolitics, Poetry, and The Dulled Public Soul
I watch with dismay as mostly Republican/Tea Party politicians refuse to tax the wealthy who, of course, are the main people they care about: they stand up for them when they don't want to close tax...
View ArticleCongratulations to Philip Levine, Our New United States Poet Laureate!
This year is turning out to be a fine one for poets I value. For example, I was happy to hear that Eduardo Corral had won the Yale Younger Poets Series Award, and now Philip Levine has been named Poet...
View ArticleTomas Transtromer Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
This year is certainly a good one: Tomas Transtromer has won the Nobel Prize. I first became aware of his work during the late 1970s/early 1980s when I studied with Phil Levine and Peter Everwine at...
View ArticleWilliam Carlos Williams' Legacy: Poetry as Poetry
I. William Carlos Williams' poetry has never generated a critical canon (unlike texts about Eliot's or Pound's poetry) that's truly appreciative of Williams' primary goal: Poetry should first and...
View ArticleTrayvon Martin's Death: The Fear of Difference
Clearly, not all of the facts have come to light in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. However, what is clear from the 911 tapes is George Zimmerman's anger at what he perceived to be a "punk" whose...
View ArticleFor My Mother, Frances R. Vasquez (1931-2013)
My mother died on Saturday, March 9, 2013. The following poem is for her who gave six children their lives--no greater gift yet devised on the planet since the universe exploded.On the Day the...
View ArticleJuror B37: How Institutional Racism Affects Jurors
I have been routinely teaching a theme-oriented composition course that focuses on institutional racism for well over a decade. During that time I've probably spend hundreds of hours doing research on...
View ArticleMy father, Jose M. Vasquez, died on Nov. 25, 2014
My father, Jose M. Vasquez, died on Nov. 25, 2014. He was 89 years old, and he would have turned 90 had he lived another 33 days.After my mother died in March of 2013, I became my father's main...
View ArticlePhilip Levine, Poet and Teacher, Dies at 87 on Feb. 14, 2015
My one great teacher, Philip Levine, died on Valentine's Day last Saturday.Of all the teachers I've studied with as a student, none were as great as Phil Levine. I had the pleasure of taking of his...
View ArticleHow to Ease Tensions Between Police and People of Color
We're witnessing an odd phenomenon: Police officers are promoting the slogan "Blue Lives Matter" in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement.What some fail to understand is that police officers...
View ArticleSlavery and the Electoral College
Few Americans understand why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College phenomenon: it can literally be traced back to James Madison and his fellow Southerners' concern that their influence in...
View ArticleTrump's NFL Comments Promote Institutional Racism
In his book Uprooting Racism, author Paul Kivel explains what he terms "the myth of the happy family" tactic that some use to promote institutional racism: Whites like to think that society is a...
View ArticleAmerica Needs a Reset: Set Terms for Supreme Court Justices, Senators,...
America has politically become a dysfunctional entity. For example, Supreme Court justices are now just as overtly politicized and as tribalized as the politicians who support them. Such a phenomenon...
View ArticleTrumpian Avoidance Tactics Have Infected Academia
Not long ago, while grading end-of-semester work, I realized that two students had committed plagiarism: both handed in literally word-for-word exact copies of certain assignments--they even used the...
View Article
