© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Shakespeare’s first nineteen sonnets are addressed to a handsome young man. Procreation is its own kind of heaven, Shakespeare tells him, urging him to breed, not waste his seed, but live on through his offspring. Beginning in sonnet fifteen, … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Reckless Paper Birds, wow, when I saw that title, it immediately appealed to me, coming out of the ether as it did one day on the Internet. Even in a pandemic, we communicate. I got in touch with the … Continue reading
© 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.
… 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.
… Bill Kushner and I used to meet and walk. On this August day, I met Bill at the F train at East Broadway, and we walked to Chrystie Street for a lunch special at the Bite of Hong Kong. … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I started to know Trace Peterson about two years ago when she was finishing up her PhD, but she was so busy that we hardly talked or were able to correspond or get anything done. What I wanted to … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I went to the La Mama Galleria a couple Sundays ago wanting to hear No Land and to see what she was going to do. I found out when I got there that she was performing with three musicians. … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… A few years back Cliff Fyman drove cab at night and began to make poems out of what customers said as he took them to where they wanted to go. Cliff came over to my place last week to … Continue reading