There are a lot of geniuses floating around the story of Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus.”

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.” Hildegard of Bingen

“Admit Something” is the best poem I’ve ever read on love. It circulates as a poem by the Sufi mystic-poet Hafiz (alternately, “Hafez”), who lived in the 14th century in Shiraz, Iran, but poems like this one from Daniel Ladinsky’s books are not so much translations of Hafiz’s work as they are “renderings” of the mystic poet.

I’ve got about 13 poems dog-eared in The Essential Etheridge Knight, but I think “A WASP Woman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison” is my favorite.

It can be tough being a lyrics person in a beats-driven world. Before I started writing Libations, the only humans I could subject to my song analysis were my children.

Person of Lyrics + Mother of 11 = Captive Audience of Annoyed Offspring

John Keats is one of the early 19th century English Romantic poets, but, as a post-20th century reader of his letters, I see Keats, the thinker, in the intersection of a two-set Venn diagram, with Romantics in one circle and Existentialists in the other.

A wad of chewing tobacco bulges behind Francine’s bottom lip as she presses a Gideon into my palm and says, “You know, Jimmy, you’re gonna die someday.”

I look down at the little green book, vinyl-bound with fake gold letters. We put ’em in every nightstand, along with a dogeared coupon for Angelino’s Pizza and a color postcard for the Klassy Gents Klub. The Stretch Motel is all about options.

I spent a lot of the seventeenth year of my life analyzing the lyrics of “The Wall” with my dear friend Herman. My children like to point out that I’m probably amongst the .001% of Pink Floyd devotees whose relationship with the band is non-cannabinical, and, though my reflections might have been more profound if I’d partaken of the sacred herb, it’s hard to imagine that I am not also amongst the .001% of devotees who mined that double cassette like it was the Old and New Testament.