another song

For a limited time, you can buy Glenrose, the beautiful, home-recorded 4 track album of my friend Brendan Little. His band is The Painted Lights


It's National Poetry Month. I want to tell you not about a great poet, but about the first poetry I really felt was mine. I was 17 years old, in New York City & nobody who knew me knew where I was. I was in a bookstore on St.Marks. I picked up a little book called Living at the Movies & read it all day in the park, smoking cigarettes, watching people who seemed to know themselves & their skin & move easily through the world & suddenly I felt more like them, felt for a moment very real. It's not that I hadn't read poetry before - I'd read Frost & e.e. cummings, & Ferlinghetti, & Dickinson, & a handful of others. In Pittsburgh, I'd write poems on the bus afterschool, going Downtown to my dance classes. It's not that Jim Carroll's book was great, but it was that I'd found it and felt that it'd found me. "look out Manhattan" it said "your prince's sorrow / might be back again tomorrow." And that seemed to make sense.