for Norbert I built a crude altar old bricks and white stones for the sculpture that gently bubbles, the sound of water in my garden – like Basho’s frog jumping in, you’d like that. Yet with morning coffee in one hand and your book in the other I hear lawn mowers, airplanes, and car engines […]
Tag Archives: Norbert Blei
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 […]
Back Beat
The first edition of Back Beat was published by Norbert Blei’s Cross+Roads Press in 2001. Blei was familiar with the poetry of both DeGenova and Rossiter and had seen them perform together as the duo AvantRetro, a performance poetry presentation using musical accompaniment and other techniques to enhance the poetry readings. Both the poetry and […]
