John Updike died earlier today.

I was reading Updike's Bech: A Book when I heard, and in it, Updike is funny and smart, and loving. 

He loved books and writing so much, and he loved showing everyone how much he loved books and writing.  You can see it on every page.… Read full post »

I've spent most of the day dropping in on poetry blogs and listening to what the poets are saying about Elizabeth Alexander.  She's the poet that Obama chose to write and deliver the inauguration poem yesterday.

Some of the poets felt that Alexander did the best she could given that there… Read full post »

I recently heard from my friend Halina Koralewski, a Polish-American interested in making sure Americans know about Polish and Polish-American history. She told me that that she had just read a book called World War II Through Polish Eyes, and she wanted to recommend the book. It sounded interestin…

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I gave a lecture recently at Benedictine Academy, a Catholic girls’ school, in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  I talked about my parents there and what they went through in the concentration camps during the war and what their lives were like after the war.  Near the end of my p… Read full post »

I recently received a list of Classic War Quotations from Simran Khurana at About.com and wasn't surprised that all of them were by men.  War seems to be the special province of men. 

But while we think about war and read about war, we should never forget that a lot of… Read full post »

 

Among poets and writers, one of the big topics of discussion recently was whether or not Obama would have a poet at his inauguration and who'd that poet be.  Presidents don't always have poets at their inaugurations, of course.  Bush and Reagan and Nixon didn't.  Kennedy,… Read full post »

A while ago, I gave a talk to a high school class about my parents and their experiences under the Nazis.  I talked about my father’s four years in Buchenwald and my mothers two and half years in various slave labor camps in Germany.

During the Q… Read full post »

My friend Joseph Lisowski is a poet, and he grew up in the shadow of the Heppenstal Steel Mill in Pittsburgh among Poles and Polish Americans who still remembered the work they did in the old country, in Katowice and Gdansk and Lublin. What they taught him was that a… Read full post »

When my father was dying of liver cancer, the doctors popped him full of morphine, enough morphine -- they thought -- to keep him drifting peacefully toward his death, but the morphine wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to make him forget what it was like in the concentration camp at/…

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 When my father was dying of liver cancer, the doctors popped him full of morphine, enough morphine  -- they thought -- to keep him drifting peacefully toward his death, but the morphine wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to make him forget what it was like in the concentration camp… Read full post »

The folk singer Odetta died today.  I read about it in the NY Times.  They said a lot of nice things about her, and about what she did for the civil rights movement in America and how she influenced a lot of singers like Janis Joplin and Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.… Read full post »

When our daughter Lillian was about five years old, she started thinking about the natural end of all the things she knew. She started thinking about dying and death.

I don't know why she did, but she did, and it made her sad and worried. She didn't want to lose her… Read full post »

I wrote the following  to thank all my generations and generations of  ancestors who simply kept going despite all the misery they faced.

My people were all poor people, the ones who survived to look in my eyes and touch my fingers and those who didn’t, dying instead of fever,… Read full post »

Last year, I posted the following. I wanted to thank all my generations and generations of Polish ancestors who simply kept going despite all the misery and grief they faced.

My people were all poor people, the ones who survived to look in my eyes and touch my fingers and those… Read full post »

 

I.  The Siege of Khe Sanh 

The Vietnam War wasn’t much in my life that year. 

Marching in the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago that spring, I wore a Vietcong cooley hat I made out of construction paper, but I wasn’t really thinking about the war.&n… Read full post »

Andy Golebiowski sent me an article from the Am Pol Eagle entitled "WWII Survivors, Families Commemorate All Souls Day." Here's the picture by photographer Peter Sloane that accompanied the piece:


It brought back a lot of memories. All Souls Day was always a holy day that I felt deeply. In Pola…

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A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog about language and loss. It was inspired by a conversation I have been having with Christina Sanantonio, a writer and blogger living in Central Illinois. She wrote about how difficult it was to talk about loss. Many of the…

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My friend the writer Christina Sanantonio and I have been having a conversation about writing about loss. It’s a conversation fueled in part by the recent suicide of the novelist David Foster Wallace. She wrote me a long letter about how we use or don’t use language to talk about…

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