Earlier this summer, just as the pandemic was easing up, and we could gather in crowds, out in the open air again, there was a poetry reading in Gowanus that I went to, right by the canal, a beautiful spot, and I got to […]
Category Archives: American Poets
Lamont Steptoe reads Etheridge Knight
Etheridge Knight and Lamont Steptoe were good friends. Shortly before he died, Etheridge laid his hands on Lamont, and his last message to him was: “Keep poetry alive!” When The Painted Bride Quarterly put together an issue dedicated to Etheridge Knight, Lamont contributed. This […]
Frank Walsh reads a poem
In the 70s when Frank Walsh and I were both going to Temple, me for the second time and he for the first—we worked on a poetry magazine called Hybris, half hybrid, half hubris—It was Frank’s idea. We managed, by hook or by crook, […]
Matt Proctor reads from City Life
Matt Proctor’s diary, City Life, spans from March to May of this year so it is hot off the presses, and full of little axiom poems that I enjoy: thought isa mirror it shows you who you are my left side is mygood […]
Marc Nasdor reads from Insurgentes/Avenues
Marc Nasdor and I arrived in NYC around the same time. I remember when he curated the Monday Night Reading Series at Saint Mark’s Church with Chris Kraus back in the day. Marc (a/k/a Poodlecannon) is a well known world music DJ in New […]
Jet Wimp reads new poems
If funny and witty had to arm wrestle with surrealism and reality for the right to be a Jet Wimp poem, they would struggle, elbows on the table forever going from the big picture down to the tiniest significant details, which some say God […]
Sharon Mesmer reads from Even Living Makes Me Die
A few years ago, Sharon Mesmer, through a bit of serendipity and endeavor, began to discover remarkable women poets of the Americas that she knew little about, or had never heard of. As she began to find more, she wrote poems to them as […]
HOWL read by Allen Ginsberg
The Vimeo below contains the 1959 Big Table Chicago Reading of Allen Ginsberg reciting HOWL, and the text is scanned from a third edition copy. If you listen as you read along, you will see that the poem is often expurgated. When Ginsberg reads […]
T. S. Eliot reads Four Quartets
Four Quartets was a favorite poem of Barack Obama when he was in his twenties; in one of his university letters he even attempted to impress a girlfriend by writing to her about it. T. S. Eliot, unlike Ezra Pound, was a fatalist not […]
Stephen Paul Miller reads Three Inaugural Poems
I’ve known Stephen Paul Miller for going on forty years now, and the conviviality of his personality has never changed; so it’s always a pleasure to run into him, and I am not one who likes surprises. He has been a good friend to […]
Nine Poems by Lewis Warsh
In a box looking for something else, I found a stapled mimeographed magazine called UNITED ARTISTS FIVE that was edited and published by Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer in 1978 when they worked together as United Artists living in Lenox, Massachusetts. In this particular […]
Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads from Late Work and Around the Day in 80 Worlds
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 by Catullus that has always […]
