… I was looking through photographs, all in a mess, not looking for anything in particular, and found the one above taken, I think, around 1987. At first I thought it was Life Cafe, but the closer I looked I could see it was probably … Read More →
Category Archives: Poetry
In my words, May 6 – 12
… The photo above is Life Cafe, or what is left of Life Cafe, 10th Street and Avenue B, NYC. (Oh those were the days!) Confucius—or was it Lao Tzu?—said that we should never be too happy on a good day because a good day … Read More →
Les Chercheuses de Poux by Arthur Rimbaud
… My favorite poem by Rimbaud is innocent and sexy at the same time. A boy has run away from home and now dirty but found some kind women place him by an open window where they start to pick lice out of his hair … Read More →
In my words, April 29 – May 5
… My mother used to have a plaque on the wall; I think it was made of wrought iron, painted black with white and red lettering if I remember correctly that said: ……Make new friends. ……Keep the old. ……One is silver. ……The other gold. For … Read More →
Poems from The Bridge by Hart Crane read by Tennessee Williams
… The Bridge, it’s said, was Hart Crane’s reaction to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which he admired very much, but Crane wanted to write about a much happier, and more American, landscape. For awhile he was in love with a sailor whose father had … Read More →
In my words, April 22 – 28
… On Friday I took the C uptown to 96th Street. A man on the train, as a pretty woman entered and sat down across from him, was reading the Times, but his eyes fluttered at the top of the page, wanting to look but … Read More →
La Beauté par Charles Baudelaire
… Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre, Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière. Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris; J’unis … Read More →
La Primavera by Pablo Neruda
… El pájaro ha venido a dar la luz: de cada trino suyo nace el agua. Y entre agua y luz que el aire desarrollan ya está la primavera inaugurada, ya sabe la semilla que ha crecido, la raíz se retrata en la corola, se … Read More →
In my words, April 15 – 21
… When I got home from work Monday afternoon, the news from Boston came over the Internet and spread so quickly that when I went to teach my evening class at PS 188, the security guards were talking about it. You could see on their … Read More →
Three Lovely Poems with Rotting Carcasses in Them: Baudelaire, Eberhart & Yorty
… Charles Baudelaire wrote Une Charogne to his lover, Jeanne Duval, a Haitian actress, who met Baudelaire when she left Haiti for France in 1842. Whether she died sooner or lived longer than the poet is in dispute, though both would succumb to syphilis. She … Read More →
In my words, April 8 – 14
… On Friday, as I walked down 2nd Avenue in the rain coming back from the gym—after some laps in the pool (my crawl is getting better, less pain in the muscles in my left arm each time I move), holding on to a rusty … Read More →
In my words, April 1 – 7
…. On April Fool’s Day, a friend, Dustin Kelly, who has become a berry farmer and producer of jellies, announced on Facebook: “Hey everybody, great news! It was kind of a back up plan, but I got an acceptance letter for a summer internship with … Read More →