Loren Paulsson

“...The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.” —from Maya Angelou 's “Caged Bird” When I moved to Oklahoma City, I used to frequent the Barnes and Noble on May, north of Northwest Expressway. I don't remember buying poetry, except for the texts in Mary Kinzie's “A Poet's Guide to Poetry” and Burton Raffel's “How to Read a Poem.” I had to drive past the Full Circle Bookstore to get to Barnes and Noble. Later at Full Circle I bought T.S. Eliot 's “On Poetry and Poets” but not “Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.” That book I found used at the now-closed Hastings in Wenatchee, Wash. But this year in Seattle we walked into Open Books and made our introverted way around the perimeter of poets, starting on the left with “A.” That's where I found Kelli Russell Agodon 's “Hourglass Museum.”  Opening with the “Dear Serious Museum Patron...

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the 20th Century Christian martyrs remembered at Westminster Abbey, London. "Pastor, you know it's hard for me when you quote Puritans…. You know they were the chaplains on slaves ships, right? Would you quote Columbus to Cherokees? Would you quote Cortez to Aztecs? Even if thei' theology was good? It just sings of your blind privilege, wouldn't you agree?" With seawater, seagulls, and creaking timbers in the background, h e continues, "It must be nice to not have to consider race…. Pastor, your colorless rhetoric is a cop-out. You see my skin, and I see yours. And they are beautiful. Fearfully and wonderfully divinely designed uniqueness. Shouldn't we celebrate that rather than act like it ain't there?"   So begins rapper, Propaganda, on his track “Precious Puritans,”  which touched off a tempest in the Evangelical blogosphere late last year. In a blog interview with Joe Thorn , Richard A. Bailey, assistant h...

On the surface, "Red Tails" (2012) is a good movie in all the ways "Flyboys" (2006) was a good movie—aerial dogfights, the camaraderie that develops between men in combat, good acting, and a great, relatively untold story—and in some other ways too. Based on John B. Holway’s book, the movie tells part of the story of the Tuskegee Airmen serving in Europe and North Africa during World War II. It starts with an exploding train and turns on the 332nd Fighter Group’s success escorting heavy bombers on missions in Europe. But there’s so much to tell, and the scale of the story somewhat undoes the movie. The characters feel like composites of real people, the plot like a composite of real events. At one point, a white pilot asks a group of black pilots what they prefer to be called, but these conversations are mostly collected one-liners and don’t develop much more than factual understanding of the Tuskegee Airmen, their stories, and the prejudices they faced. It makes fo...