Author Archives: Don Yorty

Thinking about the future in English with a lesson plan

… In English we deal with the future by using nine helping verbs called modals: will, shall, can, could, would, should, may, might, and must. Only will will ever happen; all the other modals are possibilities, the wouldas, couldas, and … Continue reading →

Alicia Ostriker reads soon to be published poems and an essay

2 Feb ’24

… On January the 27th, the poet Alica Ostriker read unpublished poems and an essay to invited guests at a friend’s apartment on the Upper Westside. I wanted to record her reading. My camcorder, after many years of good service, … Continue reading →

words are birds

29 Jan ’24

… … words are birds eye is sky … … … … …

Basil King’s Illuminations

27 Jan ’24

Basil King did all of his Illuminations the summer of 2021. He and his wife Martha had moved into a little apartment on the third floor of their daughter’s house in Jersey City while their home was being renovated … Continue reading →

Terence Degnan & Denver Butson read from Nobody Birds the Sky

18 Jan ’24

… When Terence Degnan’s father died, he wrote to his friend Denver Buston, and Denver Buston wrote back, what became a correspondence, poem letters, epistles about shared grief, the death of a brother, the death of a father, a work … Continue reading →

Sonnet 92

17 Jan ’24

… To be understood words are objectiveyet we understand them subjectively.When Willa Cather writes, “The long main streetbegan at the church, the town seemed to flowfrom it like a stream from a spring,” the proseforms naturally from the simile.Do you … Continue reading →

Basil King reads from The Cafe Review

6 Dec ’23

… Recently, I visited Basil and Martha King at their beautiful home in Brooklyn. Baz has been sketching faces in charcoal—I really enjoy the adventure of looking at them. Not long ago, he was featured in The Cafe Review, a … Continue reading →

Sonnet 44

30 Nov ’23

… I hear Dad’s chainsaw echo down the fieldcutting firewood for December’s stove. Herknife in hand Mom chops the cabbage she’ll sealin jars pouring boiling water overit first with a tablespoon of sea salt.Come November she’ll have her sauerkraut.Summer yet, … Continue reading →

Susana H. Case reads from If This Isn’t Love

29 Nov ’23

… … The poems in Susana H. Case’s new book, If This Isn’t Love, are connected by the idea of the telenovela so there is a storyline fluidity throughout with expected family and friends showing up, lovers and treacheries, familiar … Continue reading →

Michael Klein reads from The Early Minutes of Without

28 Nov ’23

Sometimes I like to take a walk. It could be in Central Park, or into the Appalachian woods. The important thing (for me anyway) is to find a comfortable spot and sit down to open a book and read. A … Continue reading →

Sonnet 13

28 Nov ’23

… The hunter and the deer are in the woods.Right now no gunshots explode the quiet.Only the wind’s unafraid to riotin a few leaves, shaking the branches goodthe living skeletons of wintertime.I hear some crows as far away as … Continue reading →

Gwen Frost reads from Self-Imposed Exile

29 Oct ’23

… Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing Gwen Frost read at the Jefferson Market Library in collaboration with other poets who are published by Broadstone Books, a small press in Kentucky, whose owner, Larry Moore, publishes many New York … Continue reading →