Well, here I am, late Monday night, July 6, 2015, listening to southern Moroccan music,
alone with Cleo the cat. I never come to this site. Not even sure why I created it. So very like
me, you know. A poet once said of my work, "He throws himself around like Pollack throwing paint."
This was said of my publishing 1600 (yes, 1600) editions of Passaic Review Ezine over a period of 5 years, beginning immediately after the infamous 9/11 and ending sometime around America's hideous, tragic, despicable "shock and awe" invasion of Baghdad.  Yeah, I'd had it. Gave up on America's chance to save itself. So, I stopped publishing at least that particular incarnation of Passaic Review. Anyway, yeah, this poet was referring to how I gave you all one hundred and fifty percent of myself in those 1600 issues. I risked myself completely. I was afraid at some point the FBI would be knocking on my door for criticizing America. But then again, I thought in some innocent notion of continuing belief in at least the ideal of this nation, in free speech, in free thought, in free expression, that, no, no one would knock on my door, unless it was to announce maybe a Pulitzer or Nobel.
Ah, see?  How egotistical I am at times. Often, really. Full of myself. But no more than Whitman was or advised us to be, no more than America itself.

Because, readers, I AM THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN POET!  I am big, vast, full of contradictions, full of criticisms of this great nation, and full of love for it. Oh my god, did I actually say love?  Yes, I did.  The way, as I've said in a poem, the way a boy loves his errant father. A father is still a father.
So America is to me. My birth place. My home.

The Moroccan music soothes me tonight.

Poet on!
Rich Quatrone