Monthly Archives: March 2012

Edward Abbey, Hoboken Author

In the mid-1980s, while living in Hoboken, I worked for several years at Viking Penguin on West 23rd Street as an editorial assistant, a glorified secretarial position for those of us with literary aspirations who were willing to accept the … Continue reading

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Revisiting “On the Waterfront” in Hoboken, by Al Desetta

(I lived in Hoboken for a decade in the 1980s. Al Desetta lived there twice as long in the 1980s and 1990s. Surely, we passed on the sidewalks, but we didn’t meet until we’d both settled in Woodstock years later. … Continue reading

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Jack Wiler: Hoboken Poet & Exterminator

In the 1980s on Washington Street, Hoboken’s main boulevard, the exterminator’s shop had a stained glass portrait of a cockroach hung in the window, a beautiful artwork done in honey browns. That was Hoboken at the time, both gritty and … Continue reading

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The Hoboken School of Poetry

Here’s a classic tale from the dawn of Hoboken’s gentrification. In the early 1970s, Sada Fretz, a book critic at Kirkus Reviews, had tired of commuting on “the weary Erie railroad with its un-air-conditioned cars and unexplained long stops,” as … Continue reading

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Nothing Triggers Memories like Music: A Hoboken Poem

Peter Aaron writes such solid music profiles for Chronogram. His account of Tommy Stinson, who began playing bass for the Replacements before he finished junior high school, sent me back to Hoboken in the 1980s, when their albums owned my … Continue reading

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The FootHills Poets: Grant Clauser

Grant Clauser’s first book, The Trouble with Rivers, is a gem. “What My Wife Doesn’t Know About Bass Fishing” isn’t an untypical title, but within these natural settings the poems perform sly wonders with metaphors to avoid slipping into sentimental … Continue reading

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The FootHills Poets: Dexter Roberts

The introduction to Dexter Roberts’s book, Imagine a World, describes him as an Uncle Sam lookalike with “rail-thin, long legs, white hair, and piercing eyes,” save that he’s a practicing Buddhist and a friend of Gary Snyder. For several decades, … Continue reading

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The FootHills Poets: Tom Jones

Tom Jones has been writing and translating poems for forty years. Now comes Nearing Palenque / Reflections on Native America: New and Selected Poems. He was a lawyer for Amnesty International in the 1970s; now he has been teaching for … Continue reading

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The FootHills Poets: Mary Strong Jackson

Here’s a poem from Mary Strong Jackson’s chapbook, Witness. She lives and blogs in Sante Fe, New Mexico. The Ordeal of Eating Fish I hold the dead fish feel the firmness of fin and tail touch the eye on a … Continue reading

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The FootHills Poets: W. Jed Berry

FootHills publisher Michael Czarnecki reveres Gary Snyder, our master poet of life in the western mountains lived and observed with simple directness. In Jed Berry, Michael has found a bearded young poet from Montana with a similar temperament. A little … Continue reading

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