Category Archives: essays

The Paradox of Practice and Purity

“The Paradox of Practice and Purity” published in the Fall 2016/Spring 2017 issue of emerge, the journal of arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute Chicago.  Thank you to associate editor Courtney Citron for inviting this conversation on the theme of practice. Click here. Blow! – now!—your way is your only […]

Jensen’s Great Poem, an essay about The Clearing School and Norbert Blei

(My friend and mentor Norbert Blei had asked me to write an essay about my experience at The Clearing Folk School in Ellison Bay, Wisc., for a book he was working on about the school, Jens Jensen the founder of the school, and his 40-year tenure as writer-in-residence at The Clearing.  Norb died this past […]

Bop Prosody, Jazz, and the Practice of Spontaneous Poetics

This study, “Bop Prosody, Jazz, and the Practice of Spontaneous Poetics,” explores the disparate concepts of jazz poetry while explaining the distinctions between the terms stated in the title. Through close readings of Hayden Carruth’s collection of jazz essays in Sitting In and through the writings of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others, to write […]