Archive - Apr 5, 2006
The politics of cancer
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/05/2006 - 21:11When I first met Kim, I didn’t know that it would only be six weeks until her mother died from cancer. Kim and her family did everything they could to fight the cancer and give her mother a few extra quality years. It was a time of big changes for me and from that, battles with cancer have taken a special place in my life.
I read about Brinn, a student of Gina Coggio’s. Gina is a teacher in New Haven who writes wonderful accounts of her experiences reaching out to students. Brinn’s mother died of cancer in the fall.
The Tradition of Political Blogs
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/05/2006 - 18:30When I dropped out of college, I moved to New York to write socially relevant poetry as I supported myself working with computers. Computers took up more and more of my time as the poetry diminished. Now, over twenty-five years later, my writing comes back to gain new focus for me.
In college, I was told that there are three books you must read if you wish to be a serious writer. Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading. T.S. Elliot’s The Sacred Wood and Denise Levertov’s Light Up the Cave. They still sit on the floor next to me and I turn to them from time to time.
The other day, I thumbed through The Sacred Wood and found this passage: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to ‘the tradition’ or to ‘a tradition’; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ‘traditional’ or even ‘too traditional.’ Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure.”
