I was talking to Glen at the café I rode to for breakfast this morning. “It’s President’s Day. Did you get him anything?” Glen has a pretty quick mind, but he thought for a moment and countered “Well, it’s one of those vestigial holidays. We’ve got a tailbone, but how many million years since we’ve … Continue reading Some Presidents Day Stories
Here’s a story. You can decide for yourself if it’s a sad or happy one. It was a spring day in 1840 in a town in rural Massachusetts named Belchertown. For children you might expect that would be a fine day for play, but that’s not what this story is about, though it is about … Continue reading Angeline Palmer
Today’s piece uses words by Robert Hayden, who was a 20th Century American poet who often wrote about that essential American subject, Afro-American history. He was born just before WWI, and was writing poetry both before and after WWII, during the rise of the New Criticism, which held that the poem exists as a thing … Continue reading Frederick Douglass
Yesterday’s post ran so long that I needed to improve it by removing some things that weren’t relevant to the story of Robert Hayden choosing a school of literary criticism to place not just his work, but his life, in context. But I love the minutiae I find when I’m researching these pieces. So here … Continue reading Coincident of Douglass and Hayden
Frank Hudson 