Author Archives: JMN

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About JMN

I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.

Right On! New Directions in Doggerel

Posted on October 13, 2025 by JMN

With its loping equine cadence, amphibrachic tetrameter holds morbid fascination for the doggerel-besotted. No one knows what it is until they hear it. Then they go, “Oh yeah. There once was a girl from Nantucket.” But they’re wrong, that’s only … Continue reading →

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A Poem Is a Sketch

Posted on October 9, 2025 by JMN

Disconcert. Defamiliarize. Distort. Disrupt. Draw, Stardust! A friend I’ll nickname Stardust, avid prose reader, has remarked that relatively few people have a taste for poetry nowadays. I surmise it’s always been so, even in this or that era when <name-your-Great-Poet> … Continue reading →

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Inwardness, Tenderness, Political Rage

Posted on October 6, 2025 by JMN

***“I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. Poet covers it all for me… I want to do justice to my inwardness, my tenderness, my political rage.” (Tony Harrison)*** ***… como una mosca espía…… like a fly on the wall… [“a spy fly”!](From “Revuelo” … Continue reading →

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‘Tirdy-Tree and One-Tird % of the Land Is Trilled, the Other Two-Tirds Not So Much’

Posted on October 4, 2025 by JMN

My title is a headline from the Bulletin of the Apico-Dental Voiceless Fricative Foundation. “Many tink current trends are a trowback to the Tirties.” (Dr. Thurgood Thackery, A-DVFF President) c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Orison for Rubble

Posted on October 1, 2025 by JMN

Depending on whether I’m going or returning, not long before or after my crossings of the mighty, tea-dark Brazos near the Arredondo bridge, I pass what appears to be a Christian church whose name has kerygma in it.  For a … Continue reading →

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Sean Singer and ‘Bird’

Posted on September 29, 2025 by JMN

Often as not a poem gives me a right old drubbing while stealing my lunch money, cackling in cold delight all the while. Instead of picking up my Big Chief tablet, shrugging and slinking back to class, I squeal like … Continue reading →

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‘Sheathed in Fetters’ or ‘Bound in Chains’?

Posted on September 26, 2025 by JMN

Afterthought foregrounded: This will go down as a wildly utopian, presumptuous, naive, impractical proposition. Imagine a world in which the devout were schooled from an early age to read the foundational scriptures of their respective creeds in the original languages … Continue reading →

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The World Is Running Out of Facts!

Posted on September 24, 2025 by JMN

Intelligence is being burned at an alarming rate. Fact incineration technologies birthed in Silicon Gulch have accelerated the depletion of natural reserves. In the advanced world, gas derived from fact-burning fuels everything from data centers and crypto mining to the … Continue reading →

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Azurea20: ‘Permit Me a Space Wherein to Hang My Voice’

Posted on September 22, 2025 by JMN

“I personally learned my own craft of writing poetry through translating poetry… I think one way to deepen the appreciation of poetry is to approach it through translation.” (Arthur Sze, new U.S. poet laureate) “Señora de las Cosas Errantes” by … Continue reading →

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Samatar Elmi Got There Before Me

Posted on September 19, 2025 by JMN

“We’re planning a way to allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board… Because if I weren’t in on this I’d be, like, ‘Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?’” … Continue reading →

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