Portside

Looking for a job sometimes seems a little like trying to join a secret society whose rules and requirements are not discernible to the naked eye, as Lee Rossi shows in his mordant poem “Interview.”

Hiroshima since August 6 1945 lives as a beginning and an end an existential dilemma. California poet Jeffrey Thomas Leong brings us to question: what if/not?

"Complete this report as fully as possible to the best/of your recollection. Do not consult video evidence." So the Carolina poet Dan Albergotti introduces the absurdities and illogic of bureaucratic obscurity that allows a person to avoid responsibility for discharging a deadly weapon.

"If they create an Enemies/List," says the poet Taj James, "Sign me up." Only by showing our solidarity with those so-called enemies can we hope that the listmakers themselves become the "enemies" of the people. These are words for our unfortunate times.

Forty years working as a machinist, poet Fred Voss zeroes in on the quiet danger of repetitive work and how comradeship and imagination transcend the boredom and the threat.

As the anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination returns in a month of political trauma, Peter Neil Carroll's "JFK" reflects on the loss of possibility and the hope for renewal.

Jan Barry, poet and longtime activist in Veterans for Peace, puts the Veterans Day holiday in its historical and spiritual perspective.

San Francisco poet William Taylor Jr. writes in the spirit of Beat poetry, finding sly ways of survival and triumph in an often dreary, hostile world.

In this time of pipeline protests in the Dakotas, poet Carol Denney sings her lyrics of a familiar ecological catastrophe: “they tear through our mountains/they tear through our town/after the damage/they’re nowhere around.”

Poet Terry Adams lives in the house formerly occupied by the hipster Ken Kesey, famous for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the influence of the latter on the former may give a clue for understanding the style and point of Adams’s poem dealing with the rights and wrongs of the universe.