© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I attended (and recorded) the panel discussion of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, a work of art she did in July 1971 that included shooting a roll of film everyday and writing everyday as well recording what was going on around … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Allen Ginsberg told me once that if you want to know what a book is about, simply open it at the middle and look down. I didn’t do this with Kazim Ali’s new book, Uncle Sharif’s Life in Music, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I like to walk, and I like to think as I walk, and I have read and even written as I’ve walked, though I usually stop when I start to write. Walking, even without the writing, has its stops, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I have some happy news. On October 2, new paintings by Robert Rhodes will be featured at Radiance, 9 West Grant Street, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They are night paintings and will be up for the autumn including fourteen oils … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Poetry in Philadelphia was a seminal experience for me. I found the Waste Land in a used bookstore on Locust Street in my teens; I read Walt Whitman there in my early twenties, and returned to the city in … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I met the artist Ching Ho Cheng through my friend Patricia Kelly when we moved to New York City in 1979. Patti and Ching had met in Paris years before. He was always a gentle task-master who’d want to … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … I caught Kaveh Akbar reading in Bryant Park last summer at an event for Sibling Rivalry Press and was enjoying the reading so much I took out my iPhone and recorded the last poem. I’d recorded him before … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Patricia Kelly and I moved from Philadelphia to Manhattan in August 1979. We stayed with our friend Marcia in a huge space she shared with several others near Houston and the Bowery. Marcia, at the time a lunchtime waitress, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Once I was very sick with pneumonia, had the temperature of 105 for several days, and my brain was as burnt as eggs fried in a pan, but as I lay there in a rank sweaty fever expecting death … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I visited Basil and Martha King at their home in Park Slope where they moved in the late 1960s when the house had little value surrounded by desolation and the turf wars of the drug trade. Their backyard has … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I am going to post a series of photos taken during the 1980s by my friend and fellow East Village resident, Don Trammel. This is the first of the series. Don put the Vimeo together and all of the … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Walking through Tompkins Square in New York City, I see red roses in the brisk air. I’ve been thinking about the present tense in English because that is what I will talk about with my students this morning, and … Continue reading