All posts tagged: loneliness

“Dismal Situations”: Loneliness, Racism, and Knowing the Present Through Verse

By Jack Chelgren | Special Projects Intern and Contributing Writer   As a word is mostly connotation,  matter is mostly aura?  Halo? (The same loneliness that separates me  from what I call “the world.”) — Rae Armantrout, “A Resemblance”   I. It’s afternoon not long ago. I’m listening to music in my apartment, and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the closer from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, comes on. The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68 And he told me, “All romantics meet the same fate someday: Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafĂ©.”