Tagged: Paul Elisha

Lately, this commentator has become acutely aware of a new, completely technologized collegiate generation. So on this Post-Spring-Break day, with the computerized I-Pod.

When Marshall McLuhan penned his now immortal phrase:  “The medium is the message,” he could have added the ultimate truism of a then little-known Ellery Sedgwick:  “In America, getting on in the world means getting out of the world we’ve known before.”  Apparently, the world we’ve known, the American-bred world of ‘bigger means better,’ is now in full flight toward the target of Teensy-Weensy land, where everything of value will now be able to fit on the postage-stamp screen of a gadget grasped between thumb and forefinger and able to store or send the sum of any known or conceptualized quantity to an automated receptor of as yet undetermined size and shape.

    April is National Poetry Month. In this edition of A Bard's Eye View, WAMC's resident poet, Paul Elisha, sits down for a conversation with Djelloul Marbrook. They discuss Djelloul's work, Brushstrokes and glances.

Djelloul Marbrook's book of poems, Far from Algiers, won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry. He worked for many years as a reporter and editor for newspapers including the Providence Journal, Elmira Star-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal, Washington Star, and others. He lives in New York s mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn.

One of the great unsolvable human mysteries, for this commentator, continues to be how, during the final days of one of the Judeo/Christian community’s most holy observances, leaders and followers of the most diverse political opinions and policies can put them casually aside, for the duration of their respective religious participations.  Then, ignore the hallowed words and meanings they’ve mouthed, as they blithely return to the most miserably consequential and unsavory shenanigans, in their games of political one-upmanship.