The Old Pothead Poems (Paperback)

Louis Armstrong said it, "Marijuana is an assistant, a friend." These poems riff off that theme, a fifty-year-long set of improv-collaborations between two old friends, Miss Mary Jane and her man, Sam.

Poems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates -- regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billy, Bessie, Woody -- hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat, Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous, sometimes savage -- poems that swing hard, come on hard, poems from Brooklyn, America, Greece, London -- in-your-face poems. And always poems composed not in the head but "on the breath." Poems that can only -- the author insists -- be read aloud.

The goal is to perfect the world, to sing the golden age into America, an absurd goal, but only by "constantly risking absurdity" can we become human.