© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Estha Weiner and I were supposed to read together last summer in Brooklyn, but unfortunately I had to be out of the city. Last week, I was happy to hear Estha read at KGB from her new book, This Insubstantial … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Lunar Chandelier Press put together a reading at Unnameable Books in early November. I brought my camcorder intent on recording the whole thing, which I did, and as you can see below. I’m afraid I was a little late … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Facebook is its own MFA program. When I wanted to be a poet back in the late 1960s, artists and writers gravitated to hip cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, to name just a few, but … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
When I arrived in NYC in the fall of 1979, one of the first things I did was to go to Saint Mark’s Church and join a poetry workshop at the Poetry Project. After all, poetry was why I’d come. … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
When I was becoming an adolescent, as I felt my body change and get hairier it wasn’t odd to think that I could be a werewolf or a vampire. Saturdays I stayed up late to watch the classic horror movie … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I love reading Basil King’s poetic histories because they connect time and place and people in unexpected ways that I find delightful. In Basil’s new collection, There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits, the first piece, “Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall,” makes … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
In 1981, Helikon Press under the direction of its publisher, William Leo Coakley, published Talbot Road, a poem by Thom Gunn. Recently, Mr. Coakley gave me a copy of this chapbook that is signed by the poet himself. I’ve … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I began reading Jaime Manrique’s Tarzan My Body Christopher Columbus over the summer, but because of some eye trouble, my watery itching eyes made it difficult to read. I persevered, however, because the poems valen la pena. As the … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
English is an old ocean whose waves have been crashing for centuries against our ears, and I can feel the breadth and breath and depth of it when I read Panic Response, a book I liked enough to read … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Some paths leading to the craft of poetry are certainly paved with serendipity. Take for example, Linda Kleinbub, who, in a round about way, came to poetry by going on a reality TV show called Ten Years Younger. Married … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
A friend of mine, the Philadelphia poet Joel Colten, on a trip across the USA, stopped to take photographs of Mount Saint Helens, and died when that volcano erupted in 1980. At Joel’s funeral—his body wouldn’t be found for … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Poets, some famous and some not so famous, have been included in NYC From The Inside: NYC through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here. This equanimity makes it a very satisfying eventful anthology. I would like to … Continue reading