February 2016
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I never "got" T. S. Eliot. When I first became serious about poetry and "intellectual" stuff, in the 50s, Eliot was the presiding grand khan of English literature. Because Eliot liked Donne, my teachers liked Donne. Because Eliot was down on Milton, my teachers were down on Milton. Eliot had pronounced that "a dissociation of thought and feeling" occurred in the later seventeenth…
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Althea Goss Pearlman, 76, of Boulder, died February 10, 2016 at AltaVita Memory Care Centre in Longmont where she had resided for the last two and a half years. Althea was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1939 to Daniel Goss and Anne Krull Goss, both teachers of mathematics. She was raised in Utica, New York and graduated as valedictorian…
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At a restaurant at the corner of Jena and Freret, the over-tattooed waitress, acknowledging our appreciation of the greens, fennel and kumquat salad, said, memorably, "People do not understand the beauty of the kumquat." An excellent instance of found poetry. And all the more brilliant in context, because I myself once asserted that "kumquat" is the most obscene-sounding…
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Cheerful, lively 70ish woman: "I was alone for thirty years. I didn't even have a date. He (man in a Mardi Gras green bowler hat) grew up in a French-speaking family in Rhode Island, We shacked up for a couple of years. Then he wanted to get married. At our age it's all about finances, so I said,…