From this Distance, At this Speed
Early morning. Beside the Interstate, westbound, on the way to my father’s house, two men stand on a wooden scaffold before a blank white billboard. The billboard is new: the bottom a green enamel trellis, the sign-space perfect white, not painted over and with two floodlamps on long pipes that hook over the top. One […]
Trust the Experts
Recent articles in the press have discussed the case of an Air Force policeman, Paul Busa, who has come forward to bring charges against the Rev. Paul Shanley. After viewing TV coverage of other allegations against the notorious self-professed proponent of sex with children, Mr. Busa says he broke down and cried, recognizing his own […]
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object. – Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, How I Learned to Drive, the latest American play to move from the […]
The Hatred of Innocence
(An edited version of this essay appeared as an op-ed under the title “Changing the language of sex-crimes against children,” Boston Globe, 11/23/98.) My ten-year-old daughter brought us the news. She told of a little boy across town who had been kidnapped, raped, and killed. She insisted I turn on the TV to find out […]
Backtalk: Notes Toward an Essay on Memoir
“To employ a textual structure which cracks wide open the whole literary convention of an age seems in more than one case to be the only means by which truth and literature can be reconciled.” — Richard Coe When the Grass Was Taller, p.85 The act of remembering one’s life and examining it for meaning […]
An Op-Ed piece on Curley Family/NAMBLA lawsuit
It’s violence, not sex Suit should expose indefensible criminality A jury’s award of 328 million dollars to the Curley family in their wrongful death suit against their son Jeffrey’s killers is a step, a large step, in the right direction. The most significant part of their search for justice, however, has yet to come. It […]
A poem from my first collection, Without Paradise: STEVENS ASTRIDE THE HEMISPHERES — for Thom Salmon Mnemosyne upreared amid atrocity concurs: this looking backward is a not so accidental death and dismemberment policy after all, appended to one’s life and health; however, squat caryatids, resentful though proud, agree that, whether a bequest or metaphor (those […]
YAWP Walt, under my bootsoles you smell like napthalene and paintwhenever the water table rises, and no one is held accountable.Generalists with cell phones selling wellness products on thebeltways of America at eighty miles per hour believethey are the first to ever want a life that’s more than labor andhave made that aspiration a creed. […]
Below is an essay by Erica Schweitzer on the historical and cultural roots of “The Tea Party.” Erica is a graduate student at Emerson College. I am posting this because I believe it should have wide circulation: she has cut through the smoke and mirrors and offers us a context for understanding this recent phenomena, […]
Some notes on poetry and dissent — remarks I made on a PEN New England panel with Greg Delanty and Linda McCarriston at The Massachusetts Poetry Festival: A poet always works with and strains against language. That may seem like a truism, and you may ask “What’s political about that?” Well, for starters, the question […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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