Riehlife’s April poetry editor for National Poetry Month Stephanie Farrow is a fine poet in her own right and a close friend since we served in Peace Corps Ghana in the 1970s. Stephanie selected these Adinkra poems by A. Kayper-Mensah (Sankofa: Adinkra Poems) Stephanie tells us: Adinkra symbols are pictographs that reflect a specific proverb…
My Uncle Willard (Davenport) Thompson mostly wrote prose in his life, but we recovered this poem from his papers this winter during my father’s documentation project. Uncle Willard was a brilliant man caught short in the Great Depression who used his creativity to start a literary magazine, Ride the Rails as a hoboe, and, in…
Pop gets up a little later now at 92. He’s earned it, as I see it. “I feel like Aunt Mim. She told me, ‘Erwin, it takes me an hour to get out of bed.’ My this and my that aches. I’m getting to be an old man, and I don’t like it.” “True. It’s…
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry by Howard Nemerov from “Sentences” Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly…
On a beautiful Spring day two events in the Central West End of St. Louis resonated with National Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month. Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s memoir “Three Little Words” focalized a room filled with adoption and foster care reformers at Left Bank Books which donated 10 percent of all purchases to CASA St. Louis…
“Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.” –Antonin Artaud, poet, essayist, playwright, actor & director
When Mary Oliver read in St. Louis at Art & Soul Cafe, Christ Church Cathedral in December 8th at 1210 Locust Street, downtown, a group of 200 hushed Mary Oliver fans gathered to hear her read. It was thrilling to be in her presence and in the assembly of her devotees. —JGR PRAYING by Mary…
Wizard Altar, by Janet Riehl “Thinking as if…magic is real.” If someone gave you a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could be a character from any book, who would you be? What is the silliest thing to ever happen to you?
Genie Keller, along with being a fine poet, is a longtime family friend. –JGR ___________________ DIRECTOR! by Genie Keller Within my heart, my very being, throbs the chords of endless music. In dreamy sections of my thoughts, my hands and arms direct the stream of notes. I am engulfed, my heart beats fast, I plunge…
All week I’ve been thinking about and talking about Bill Moyers Journal March 28, 2008 look at “an update of the Kerner Commission Report, which blamed the violence on the devastating poverty and hopelessness endemic in the inner cities of the 1960s.” There is a transcript and podcast and background material here you’ll want to…