Louis Armstrong once said, ?Marijuana is an assistant, a friend.? These poems riff off that theme, a fifty-year-long set of improv-collaborations between two old friends, Miss Mary Jane and her man, Sam.
Poems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billy, Bessie, Woody hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat. Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous, sometimes savage poems from Brooklyn, America, Greece, London?in-your-face poems. And always poems composed not in the head, but ?on the breath.? Poems that can only?the author insists?be read aloud.
SAM ABRAMS has been a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens, one of the original workshop leaders at The Poetry Project, a longshoreman, a TV journalist, a union laborer, a communal organic farmer, and a jail cell mate of Dr. Spock. For the past twenty years, his second home has been Chania, Crete. Married to author Barbara Leeb, he has two sons and two grandchildren.