Day: September 5, 2013

The Cost of LivingThe Cost of Living

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:00 pm

Eight dollars is the cost of admission to Greenwood Beach.
Seven dollars and a quarter is the federal minimum wage
for hourly workers under certain circumstances.  The state’s
minimum is eight and a quarter.  These are the wages
beneath which it is considered no worker could be justly paid,
unless that worker is a tipped employee dependent upon
the largesse of drinkers and diners sated with food
and beverage.  Or unless the worker is an intern—
interns can be had for free—or a migrant farm worker,
shuffled from field to field, sleeping in a shack, drinking
tepid water from a rusty bucket—or an illegal immigrant
shoehorned two dozen to an apartment, never let out except
to be taken to the job, working sixteen hours a day
for room and board, exhausted sleep filled with American dreams.

Easy-peasyEasy-peasy

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:07 am

“As soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers. I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem. Call it a poem.” — William Burroughs (interviewed by Philippe Mikriammos in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984, Vol. 4.1)