© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
In March of 1949—not sure of the day—Billie Holiday showed up for a photo shoot at Carl Van Vechten’s. She was told to wear a gown, but wore a grey dress. Her mood, we are told, was also grey. Van … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
In the Vimeo below, Charles Bernstein reads part of a poem from his book, Dark City that he made for his friend Li Zhimin, a poet and professor at Guangzhou University in China. The excerpt was selected by Li … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I am a big fan of chapbooks because they are heartfelt and often come straight from the author. Bonny Finberg’s Déja Vu is that kind of hands-on book with words and collages by the poet herself, a work of … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Joan Eardley painted children in the slums of Glasgow and then lived in Catterline, a fishing village nobody went to. She found beauty in the often shabby common present. It is what I admire about her. The paintings below … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
A year ago, I heard Greg Masters read new work at the Parkside Lounge. The poems he read then are now published in It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This. The art work on the cover by Ava Fedorov … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Michael Ruby is not only a poet, but a journalist who works as an editor at the Wall Street Journal where he is involved with the news—whatever it may be—right there in the thick of it from day to … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
What better way to start than at the beginning. These will be the first poems in my new book, Fucking and Other Poems, which will be published soon by Indolent Books. Till then Enjoy. words are birds … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
When I look back on my life as a reader, there are particular books I remember with pleasure because they drew me in as soon as I started them. Tom Sawyer was one, and Wuthering Heights—much to my surprise—was … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I’ve heard Francine Witte read her Charley poems on several occasions, and I’ve always enjoyed them, so it had been on my mind to ask her to read them for the blog. Charley is a man (the many men) … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Hound Dog, a twelve-bar blues by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, was first recorded by Willie Mae Thornton on August 13, 1952 in Los Angeles. I, whose birthday was on August 15, would have been turning three at the … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
It’s the little things, the good word, the bon mot that come down to us. “Festina lente,” the Emperor August used to say: “Hurry slowly.” Words I try to live by. Other words to try to live by can … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
It has been several years now since Tom Savage asked me to become a member of Brevitas, an online poetry group that posts fourteen line poems, or shorter, twice a month, on the first and the fifteenth. It is … Continue reading