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A sound bite
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There are a lot of geniuses floating around the story of Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus.”

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.” Hildegard of Bingen

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.” W. B. Yeats

“Admit Something” is the best poem I’ve ever read on love. It circulates as a poem by the Sufi mystic-poet Hafiz (alternately, “Hafez”), who lived in the 14th century in Shiraz, Iran, but poems like this one from Daniel Ladinsky’s books are not so much translations of Hafiz’s work as they are “renderings” of the mystic poet.

I’ve got about 13 poems dog-eared in The Essential Etheridge Knight, but I think “A WASP Woman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison” is my favorite.

“All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different...” T. S. Eliot

It can be tough being a lyrics person in a beats-driven world. Before I started writing Libations, the only humans I could subject to my song analysis were my children.

Person of Lyrics + Mother of 11 = Captive Audience of Annoyed Offspring

John Keats is one of the early 19th century English Romantic poets, but, as a post-20th century reader of his letters, I see Keats, the thinker, in the intersection of a two-set Venn diagram, with Romantics in one circle and Existentialists in the other.

When the few stand against the many, when the weak stand against the strong, the act of resistance awakens in us the ennobling possibilities of our own existence. David and Goliath. The Patriots and the Redcoats. The Battle of Thermopylae. Someone recently suggested to me that this rooting for the underdog is a distinctly American thing, and, while I’m sure there are exceptions and nuances across individuals, cultures, and epochs, I believe it is, fundamentally, a human thing.

I launched my writing career in third grade. My first work was fictional, complete with captivating setting, lively characters, colorful illustrations, and at least one major plot point. My mother carefully typed the story, a couple of sentences per illustrated page. My first published work. My first byline. “The Lunch Box Surprise” by Sandy K. Schwartz.

A wad of chewing tobacco bulges behind Francine’s bottom lip as she presses a Gideon into my palm and says, “You know, Jimmy, you’re gonna die someday.”

I look down at the little green book, vinyl-bound with fake gold letters. We put ’em in every nightstand, along with a dogeared coupon for Angelino’s Pizza and a color postcard for the Klassy Gents Klub. The Stretch Motel is all about options.

I spent a lot of the seventeenth year of my life analyzing the lyrics of “The Wall” with my dear friend Herman. My children like to point out that I’m probably amongst the .001% of Pink Floyd devotees whose relationship with the band is non-cannabinical, and, though my reflections might have been more profound if I’d partaken of the sacred herb, it’s hard to imagine that I am not also amongst the .001% of devotees who mined that double cassette like it was the Old and New Testament.