© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I’d been wanting to get Rachel Blau DuPlessis on my blog for a long time. In Philly at Temple University in the mid-seventies where I was studying Latin, French and Spanish, I heard her read a sparrow poem inspired … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I wonder if, when Emily Carr went as a young woman to study painting in Paris in 1910, she might have read the sonnet, Vers dorés, by Gérard de Nerval that ends: Souvent dans l’être obscur habite un Dieu caché;Et, … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Back in the early 1980s, my friend Stephen Spera began to make poetry postcards for me. And then I took over the enterprise. Now I work on a lot of sonnet postcards. Here are seven non-sonnet postcards with the first … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
In Io’s Song, some of the poems are as beautiful to look at as they are to listen to and read. I have always been a fan of poets whose first language isn’t English, but who speak and write the language … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
In high school, my classmate, Mary Kopala, had an older brother in college studying for a PhD in Engineering, if I remember correctly, and he brought the record album, The Fugs, home at Christmas for her to listen to. … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … I … … I will only write about books that are on my bookshelves now; if the book is not here, then I won’t mention it, so I won’t be mentioning books like The Idiot, which may have … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… On September 13, 1955, Carl Van Vechten photographed the fairly well unknown James Baldwin who had just published his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was already … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Bamboo Pavilion is a beautiful jewel of a book. Chinese poets like Du Fu and Li Bai are translated by Alfred Corn with paintings by the contemporary Chinese artist, Joanne Wang, the present and that past in a really … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… A year ago I got in touch with Timothy Liu and asked if I could record him reading from his new book, Let It Ride, which was coming out in September. Well, one thing led to another, and we … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… When I read the poems by Patricia Spears Jones in the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I immediately got in touch with her and asked her if I could record her reading them for my blog. If not … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Jason Schneiderman’s new book, Hold Me Tight, has some striking violence on its cover yet is very comfortable to hold. It’s this oxymoron about the book that pleases me the most. Pleasing too is the fluid order of the … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… In the early 1970s, poets began to memorize their poems so what was coming to the listener was coming from the poet, not from the page. Janet Hamill was one of the first to do this as much a … Continue reading