Movie Review: Short Term 12 and Robert Frost's "Bereft"

For the old e.e. cummings post, how’s this link? (Please feel no pressure to read it).   http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=when+serpents+bargain

Yesterday I saw an awfully good movie about foster teens, which is related to the government shutdown. That is, how does our society treat its neediest humans?  

Short Term 12 was in one of the art theaters here and left today after stay of about three weeks. But maybe you can get access to it where you are, or online, or through Netflix, etc. It stars Brie Larson and John Gallagher, Jr. (he’s Jim on The Network), who play counselor-caretakers in a group home. They are very convincing. There’s enough humor and romance to balance—but surely not to cancel out—the gritty social and personal issues for the caretakers and foster kids alike. This is a first-rate, low-budget indie movie that makes us know and care about the characters. 

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bereft/

I've been looking for an appropriate time to post Robert Frost's very big little poem, "Bereft," and now, as I think about that movie's teens and their dark nights (and days) of the soul, maybe "Bereft" is just right. Troubled, abandoned fifteen-year-olds, lonely old men living alone, and all those in-between probably have similar feelings and thoughts at times. I wonder if they--no, we--can be of any comfort to each other.

CORNY LITTLE SERMON

Nomad Exquisite by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I realize how long this is, and I'm embarrassed. Over the next two or three days, I'll post it in smaller sections, but I'll leave the whole here today for those who prefer their punishment in one sitting. So here we go . . .


Recently the blogger at Brenda’s Arizona (http://arizonabren.blogspot.com/) mentioned that two days after her beloved Packers won the Super Bowl, she was finishing Steve Martin’s new novel. She found it good in its own right; however, because it deals with painting, she also ended up reflecting on art and the possibility of different kinds of art in dialogue with each other. Maybe it was that suggestion of conversation that made her remember Steve Martin’s banjo skill as a kind of music her father loved. She mentioned all this to her husband and their several rescue dogs.

Robert Frost wrote, “how way leads on to way.” Sports, literature, art, music and their personal associations—don't they create especially fertile ground for the kind of achievable saturation in a life well-lived? A lot if it is luck, but we can create paths that help luck find us, and one step is simply hanging around good writing, music, art, nature (including science), and the people who love them--friends and any family who aren’t biting for the moment.



In Wallace Stevens’ “Nomad Exquisite,” the poet finds a promising inroad to luck in a Florida that's all green, and gold and green, in a “big-finned palm,” in “immense dew” and a “young alligator.” Gerard Manley Hopkins finds it in a soaring, then diving falcon, while Keats drifts into the song of a nightingale and a Grecian urn. These were Gifts some poets found; they passed them on to us.

So am I just perverse and combative in wondering why and how so many bloggers, poets, artists, musicians and music lovers, walkers in nature, athletes and fans can find what they need, while so many among the political conservatives cannot be satisfied unless they’re fighting or exploiting someone?

Redefining wealth along the lines of birds and football and nature walks is fundamental to a wiser, kinder humanity. Yes, we need food, shelter, etcetera before we can care about Beethoven or Steven Martin’s banjo. But get real. Even in the wake of a financial crisis, hundreds of millions of Westerners—the vast majority—have plenty of food and shelter. In fact, referring to their possessions, their stuff as mere “food and shelter” is offensive; it trivializes those who actually are in dire straits.


Yet so many are smiling, thoughtless ravagers and hoarders who hide under the euphemism of “capitalism” and snarl with fear that some disadvantaged group is even hungrier and angrier and will come take away a cubit of their pile of stuff. How ironic it is that it’s groups of their own—bankers, brokers, not the smelly downtrodden--who will creep in at night to steal their stuff.

If this is a brotherhood of tea-loving hoarders, surely their most peculiar members are those plastic straws on Main Street who suck on Glen Beck’s Mindless Milkshakes.

Well, that was a self-indulgent sentence, I admit. But how am I to comprehend Reagan Republicans in modest bungalows and apartments who surely cannot answer what Reaganomics ever did for them. “If I make 30K for a family of five, I need more. I know! I’ll help make the obscenely rich richer; that will trickle down to me. You know, the way it did at Enron.”

I submit that CBRs (the Cheyney-Bush-Rove disciples) need a new heart, the kind that’s more than an organ. Along with the crackhead Dons of Wall Street, most were born into every advantage offered by the wealthiest society on the planet. But they wanted more.

TG&S! (TheseGuys&Sarah!) don’t settle for little . . . Gifts . . . like poems or music or art or hillsides. They want kingdoms, or at least BFFs (Big Forever Fiefdoms). The many Bible-Thumpers among them surely wink or take strange medicine as they dare to claim they want their BFF as a feature of Christianity, which to a minority is a code that celebrates modesty, humility, obedience, and purity of spirit.

Somehow along the way, TG&S! didn’t get theirs. With a bounty on their tables, they’re mysteriously hungry, angry, and pathologically competitive. Don't you dare call that healthy ambition. Don’t you dare extol that as an absence of welfare laziness. You know perfectly well it goes way beyond that, eating anything in its path.



My beef is that I’m sick of not understanding, not even imagining, a scenario that explains such hyper-focused, rapacious Me-ism. I’m sick of not getting it. TG&S!, I don’t want your moronic hoarded stuff; I want to know what makes you tick. Of course, what would I do with that information--go fall on my sword?

I guess I’m being downright quaint to wonder if a good passage of poetry or thirty minutes a day with Earl Scruggs or Beethoven or Buddha or film of the Packers' training camp, where it's more about skill than vanquishing . . . I'm peculiar to wonder if those might have been The Gift that slaked their thirst.

So what might have worked? 72 virgins? Hell, give ‘em 73. I’ll pay for that last one if it’ll make them retreat to their mansions, put away their guns, and shut up. But I don’t count on any of that—these guys need something they didn’t get, and they don't know what it is any more than I do, but it’s bigger than a virgin, bigger than a breadbox. There’s a hole in the middle of them, and they can’t fill it up.

So let’s return to the fact that much of our culture is rich with Gifts that weren’t stolen from Grandma’s pension. Banjos. Parks to walk in. Games to play or watch. Paintings and Poems? They might disturb us internally. In fact, they should; they cause troubling self-examination. But that means they challenge us to do better, too see both ecstasy and injustice better than we did-- and they comfort us in our failures. None of that has anything to do with exploiting others to gather more trinkets for our pile of stuff—unless you count our books.

So let’s go give ourselves some cheap, invaluable Gifts—gifts we can quote or hum or envision because somebody else has been better than we are at expression; somebody else has been exquisite here and there. Try to share this with those poor CheyneyBushRove boys down the street, for they are victims—someone ripped out the middle of them, and they want to rip back.

And don’t forget cuddly Rush and puffy Glen. They never intended to hate everyone and everything that doesn’t gleam like chrome, to sell fear and hatred like two flavors of popcycle. They just don’t know any better; the carny act is their only skill. They don’t understand grace or passion. If the goal is not acquisitive, they don’t get it; concepts like “Enough” are too lofty for a whole lot of people.

Therefore, some of them incline toward weeping. You know, if you cry a lot, you must be sad, and Sad is just the other side of Mad—even in Congress, even on TV.




Maybe I should compose country music about all this. And, imploring the hillbilly Muse, I could quote Wallace Stevens, for poems don’t plead for money and mansion. Instead they beg from gods in swamps: “in me, come flinging/Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.”

When a song works, it blows off the top of your head. Emily Dickinson said so. Yet songs and poems are cheap, and you don’t need to beat up on anybody. You go there to be conquered.

Nomad Exquisite by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Robert Frost, "After Apple Picking." November Continues.

After Apple Picking by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Here’s a classic, as well as a quiet Sunday evening and November poem (or literally, October, I suppose). In the language of our time, we might also see it as metaphorical talk about retirement in addition to the approach of old age and death. The speaker's long, careful work has been finished—it had to be, for more would be all “ache” and might supplant the somber, dignified sense of completion he feels.

When a poem seems as natural, approachable and likable as the Tufted Titmouse to the left, we need to ask how it got that way. We need to make a conscious effort to notice any parts or features we especially like. So if you feel like it, please comment on any images, phrasings or ideas you find striking or unusually appealing.

The following three and half lines ring true for me in describing a kind of work that matters to the speaker, maybe a career as opposed to a job.

. . . I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Is it far-fetched or corny to see those lines as an apt analogy to a teaching career? If students are not delicate apples who (think they) will be tossed onto the cider heap of inferiority if teachers mishandle them, then I have badly misconstrued much of the enterprise.

Mind you, the delicate fruit doesn't have to be students. How about photographs or other works of art, pieces of writing, an attorney's clients, a doctor's patients, a carpenter's pieces, a mechanic's restored machines, one's own children, old or current loves? Haven't most of us carried one or another kind of fruit and felt forced to be careful with it? Maybe this is my favorite idea in the poem: the effort was worth it, but from it we can feel overtired, even though it's the harvest we desired.

As a final note, here is Frost sounding entirely casual and conversational again, for example: "and not let fall." There must be other, but more formal ways to say that, but Frost wants to sound as if he's chatting over a New England stone fence. So we need to notice the poem's rhyme and meter (on a third reading, if not the first). Monday's assignment, therefore, is a five-page paper on the ways Frost's poetic devices affect the poem as a whole, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course, your choosing to accept the mission doesn't mean I'm going to read it . . . .

If you focus on the bad and the ugly, you might wonder, with me, whether the woodchuck at the end is just a too-folksy way to avoid saying "death." I'm not being coy; my jury really is still out, has been for decades, on a whole host of things.

**

FROST, "BIRCHES." Gifts, Part 3.

(Student? footnote!)


Birches by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


I realize I’ve grown tedious with analysis—in which we ANAL-eyes everything, as some students sometimes say (the ones who got Ds). But I’ve gone this far, so I’m plowing ahead. Come along if you like. There will be no sprinting.




By the way, my motives aren’t all that self-centered. It’s an old idea (and one I share) that the arts, including poetry, are legitimate new ways to perceive the world we walk through. Or, the arts are ways to “speak” in a particular manner the perceptions we’ve all had, but have not articulated to our own satisfaction. In order to talk about those arts, to get beyond “I like it,” it helps to look at details, which might require some technical thinking and language. So here’s a teaspoonful; try not to slurp.

As counterpoint to the long, prosy look and feel of the lines in “Birches,” there is the rhythm. It’s easy to overlook because we tend not to listen for it, especially in a rushing world of free verse, much of which is merely prose talking. Or yammering. Or belaboring the obvious. Or regurgitating.

Also, Frost achieves such naturalness that we might be surprised to find traditional meter. But in fact “Birches” is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter; two syllables of tuh-DUH, more or less, and more or less five tuh-DUHs in each line).

Iambic meter is the rhythm closest to the natural cadence of English speech; even so, it offers an understated musicality to a poem that looks and feels like prose. Or, if it does feel like poetry, we might not realize why.

The first four lines consist of perfectly regular iambs, five per line—therefore, pentameter. Now that we’ve heard that, at least subconsciously, in the very opening, Frost can stray from it occasionally if he needs to, for the sake of naturalness, or for emphasis—or to avoid a childish, sing-song, “hickory-dickory-dock” effect.



There. That’s enough of the academic biz for awhile. I hope somebody out there will comb through the poem for other gifts from Frost. Good and great poetry must offer them, whether as music, or word pictures, or depth of emotion or intellectual reasoning. But speed reading will miss too many. We don’t go to Gregorian chants because they’re zippy and easy.

I was late in arriving at respect for Frost, and one reason is that I thought he was simplistic. Now I’m sure he’s anything but, even in popularized poems like “Stopping By Woods” and “The Road Not Taken.” So I hope there will be some scouting out there—of Frost or other poets. Life is short, but the gifts are many, and poetry’s cheap. So hie thee thither and get ye to gathering. And remember, the tortoise will gather more than the hare.

Birches by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

FROST, "BIRCHES," PART 2

(Any student using any of these words or ideas should be sure to footnote properly).

Birches by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

These are some pics from northern Michigan, which unexpectedly cued Frost’s “Birches” for my previous post and again today. So let me comment on what I like in the poem, though it certainly has plenty of fans already.

In addition to the literal portrait of a boy swinging on birch branches, I hear Frost trying to show how we all might want to experiment with the infinite—which in the mind and spirit of the boy is the upper air where the birch branch takes him.

But note that Frost is careful to announce that he doesn't mean any kind of death wish. The speaker wants just a taste of whatever's next for humans, but he also wants to be sure he returns to earth, the right place for love.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.

The poem feels somewhat long and talk-y, and I wonder if Frost considered breaking it into stanzas (or verse paragraphs, as they’re sometimes called in cases like this). White space can make writing more inviting.

That might sound simplistic, but I’ve heard a lot of intelligent readers mention how much they like dialogue in novels. White space might be only part of the explanation, but it’s a factor. (You might have noticed that I try to keep my Banjo paragraphs short if at all possible—and it usually is).

From another angle, however, the length of the lines and the argument in “Birches” also illustrate a hobbyhorse of mine for any poem: there must multiple gifts for the reader along the way. Anyone who goes slowly and reads aloud, will probably not go more than five lines without finding something unusual or appealing or rewarding.

Consider the first five lines:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them . . .

In spite of the abundant birches in Michigan, I never noticed, or paid attention, to the way a line of birch bark sometimes crosses darker branches of other trees (or vice versa), as if the two species are in a kind of tension or conflict.

And wondering whether a swinging boy or an ice storm caused that bent branch is something I feel I should have wondered about. I’m glad Frost took care of it for me. Reminding us what we could have, or should have, noticed is often what poetry does for readers, if they open themselves to it. “You must have seen them,” Frost says. It’s as if he knows I didn’t see them. I feel gently chided by an avuncular voice and spirit.

Here are lines 6 – 10:

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Do you like the fancy word, “onomatopoeia,” which denotes a word that sounds like the thing it refers to? Isn’t “click” a magical example? And Frost won’t let up; we also are knocked with other “k” sounds: “many-colored, cracks, crazes, crystal.” Does anyone care to dispute that the hard “k” is a sound of vigor, if not violence? So, as pretty as the images might be in lines 6 – 10, there is also something like the sound of attack, or at least force and breakage. There is nothing gentle in the “k” sound, and that creates a kind of counterpoint to the pictorial loveliness, as if to say, "Don't get too sappy: the birches are nice to look at, but there's some upheaval and menace going on as well. There's about to be shattered glass . . . . "

In lines 6 - 10 there is also sibilance—a few “s” sounds in proximity of each other. That’s usually considered unpleasant, once again to prevent our acceptance of everything as just lovely, just lovely.

I can hear someone yelling at me for splitting hairs. Look. If I had to wake you at 5:00 a.m. for some difficult, unpleasant journey or task, should I say, “ooooohhhhhhh” (like warm, melting chocolate, maybe) or “sssssssssssss,” like a rattler about to strike.

One more thing: when you see ice-coated trees, do you think “enamel”? Me either. Don’t you think we should have? Look what we missed. That’s one more reason that he’s Frost and we’re not.

Part 2 tomorrow or soon. Hope the anticipation doesn’t keep anyone awake.

****

Frost's "Birches." SELF-ESTEEM AND LUCKY STRIKES.

Birches by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I'm back. Thanks for your patience.

Left: Two Kids in Competition. (The Checker Players, Bingham, 1850)


While visiting the town of Houghton Lake in north-central Michigan, I was parked next to an elementary school at quitting time. As they waited for their rides, one ten-year-old boy said to his buddy, “If you fist-bump me again, I’m gonna bite your face.”

But school was out and both kids needed their rides, maybe even from the same driver. They were stuck with each other. When I pulled away, The Fist-Bumper still had a face, and the two were bosom buddies, lazily shooting the bull.

When my gang was ten, playing Lucky Strike was one of our rituals. Walking around town, the first guy to spot a discarded pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes could step on it, holler “Lucky on me,” and slug the shoulder of the nearest other guy, who was expected to endure the blow without protest or tears.

Usually, the Lucky puncher gave a dramatic but half-hearted jab, partnered by a lot of shouting and editorializing about his victim's character flaws. The intent was to menace and annoy, not to inflict important pain. No one said this, but we understood it.

Occasionally, some thug-kid joined us from the margins and showed his poor breeding by lambasting the victim with an all-out roundhouse that brought tears, curses, or both. The violator would then feign innocence; he didn't know the rules, he didn't swing that hard, blah blah blah.

That might have been my introduction to a phrase I’d hear so often in life, verbatim or paraphrased or silently implied: “Not our kind of people.” These days, I use it only in order to mock it, even as I grudgingly admit its significance, see pretty clearly the dangers of any We vs. Them.

By the way, the Lucky Strike mayhem rarely happened with only a pair of kids. An audience of two or more somehow validated the tradition and bore witness. Who had quick enough feet to get to the empty Lucky pack first? And how hard was the punch to the shoulder? After all, if it was too weak, the puncher’s manhood might be in doubt. Oh, yes--and how stoically did the victim receive the blow?

So as we walked our streets and alleys, each kid was constantly on the lookout for used-up packs of Luckies. I won't speak for other towns, but that is how the Clawson males, always on the prowl, became such rotten listeners. I thought you ought to know, and those guys don't say much.

Birches by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

*

Independence Day with Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and a Touch of Thoreau

On a day for celebrating America, I tried to find some Whitman I could stomach and came up both empty and overwhelmed by gas. So let's try a spiffy aphorism from Thoreau and think about America in the midst of urban sprawl: "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

I don't think I'm forcing the issue by offering a companion piece--a companion by contrast: one of Robert Frost's best and best known poems, "Mending Wall."

I don't want to humbug the holiday--as if I could--by wondering aloud whether Americans have a new, definite, almost hostile craving for walls between themselves and their neighbors. But I think I see and hear it almost daily, and I know of ways I'm guilty of it. Surely one of the most obvious patterns in American history, and in Frost's poem, is the country's dislike for barriers, the way earth itself dislikes walls and over time destroys them.

To re-state the obvious, every immigrant group who's come here after the first colonists has been walled out by those who came earlier. Africans, Chinese, Italians, Irish, and on and on goes the list until it becomes a cliche no one listens to, regardless of its obvious truth. Apparently we want to stick to conversations and people we know rather than what is new and interesting--and maybe challenging.

Frost's earth and its people (the hunters, for example) don't like walls, and apparently we still don't. Despite all the appearances to the contrary, our walls are temporary. However, there must be hostility, sadness and even bloodletting in the short term. Walls don't fall in a day; they crumble over time (excuse the soap box).

"Mending Wall" is much more personal as a poem than it is historical or political, but I think the comparison holds: over time, the United States hasn't tolerated walls any more than the earth has, and that might be the nation's most singular, defining characteristic. As the ground and gravity mess with the stones and bricks a little every day, they slowly but inevitably overturn the obstacles to change, especially the chunks and wads that are man-made.


Mending Wall


Okay, now let's get that beer and hot dog. Or Kielbasa? A side of hummus? Woo Dip Har? Pad Thai? Tandoori Chicken?


**

Poetry: What Is It?

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More




the singer








the stand-up






















a scene





Dadgummit, Brenda, in your comments last time, you've steered me completely off course. My response to you got so long that I'm turning it into today's post.

So the Richard Wilbur poem waits at least another day, and the shorter, but not simple Gwendolyn Brooks poem goes up today. It's famous enough that many might already know it, but it's poetry, it's rock-hard, it's musical, and it has something to say, maybe something quite daring.

But first, here again is "The Ineffable" by Bilgere or "Brenda's guy”:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/01/25

What I find, as I do with so much of the "School of Accessibility," is that most of the poem could just as reasonably have been prose. Why has the poet chosen to break his writing into lines, chosen to call them verse? In Bilgere’s “The Ineffable,” I think the piece became poetry about 70% of the way into itself. Or, let’s say it becomes a poem somewhere in the last stanza.

That endless set-up, in language that’s actually prose, is true of many poems out there today. Some, of course, never do become poetry. Maybe that's OK; it's certainly popular. But if I go to poetry, I want frequent nuggets that will stand up to examination by a competent, demanding gemologist—let's say at least a nugget every three lines (this mathifying is absurd, I realize, but bear with me).

What do I mean by a nugget? As Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Bilgere’s lines have appealing, witty images, and I like its overall theme about fantasy. I've been the victim of that kind of self-deception, and I know others who have. But I see no reason that the piece could not, should not, be a prose short story.

In fact, we now have additional categories: flash fiction, sudden fiction, prose poem, ultra-talk. So why forcibly break one’s words and sentences into lines trying to be, claiming to be, poetry? Does the writer have that much contempt for prose? It can be as deep and as moving as poetry, and it pays better, by a lot.

Let me repeat: I enjoyed “The Ineffable.” I have some respect for its way of couching important psychology in humor. But I doubt that I’ll ever admire it the way I do so much of Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Keats, Frost, Plath, Dylan Thomas, or more recently, Seamus Heany, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Kay Ryan, and on and on. In their work I find a gift in almost every line, the kind that Emily Dickinson said would blow off the top of your head--that's when you know you're in the presence of poetry--not at the end of a long, prosy build-up, which can resemble a joke on Comedy Central.

Let’s go there. As I’ve said before, I respect a lot of stand-up comics. I’ve recently realized how much they have in common with poets, alone on a stage, risking everything in what they say and the way they say it. But should we call them poets? Of course, in their case, “comedian” doesn’t have the clout of “poet” (or “physician,” or “philosopher” or “taxidermist”); but let’s then get a new word for stand-ups rather than stealing “poet” from the poets.

In the same light, why not write fiction and call yourself a fiction writer or novelist? I don’t get it.

Can we have narrative poetry? Yes, of course. But remember, Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is narrative. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a story. Surely there's no doubt that they are poems. Ditto Browning's "My Last Duchess," since Brenda mentioned it.

Also, I did refer to vast shades of grey, where Frost might be at times (but that's most likely to happen only if we don't hear his rhythms, which is most likely to happen in his blank verse poems). Even Whitman’s bombastic chanting and repetition are closer to what we usually mean by “poetry” than many of today’s poem-chats.

The whole matter is treacherously subjective. One person's music is another person's drone; one person's verbal gem is another's piece of gravel. But I’m not sure the issue of conversation and prose, on the one hand, compared to poetry on the other is sufficiently prominent and honest. There was a flurry of commentary and challenge a few years ago, when Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland and others were rising to prominence, but the topic seems to have evaporated.

It’s understandable that poets don’t want to challenge each other much on such debatable grounds; their status in our culture is too precarious for them to fight among themselves. But I think the talk—dare I say the “conversation”— could be more thorough and probing than it is, at least as far as I know.

Of course, the flip side of that coin would be universities that fire their writers-in-residence because they don't belong to this or that school of verbal aesthetics. There's no winning. That's why we turn to poems like "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks:

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

* *