… … Ed Friedman and Bob Rosenthal created, coordinated, and curated seven poetry readings at Bowery Poetry on Tuesday nights from January 14th to March the 4th 2025. These readings featured twenty three poets. Most of these poets were already here when I arrived in New York City in 1979 and moved to the East…
Voyages is a play by Lonely Christopher about the life of Hart Crane, seminal scenes, acts that created the poet. I love Hart Crane. I first encountered him in my romantic twenties, an inspiring poet whose life, prophetic, tragic, and profane, was very much there in his words. On February the 3rd, a month ago…
In my twenties I was lucky to find an LP of Tennessee Williams reading Hart Crane poems at a record store in Philly. I’ve converted them to Vimeos and include Voyages III and V here. Enjoy. III Infinite consanguinity it bearsThis tendered theme of you that lightRetrieves from sea plains where the skyResigns a breast…
Jada Gordon is a cohost for the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, and over the years has introduced me to many new poets. I’d like to return Jada’s wonderful selfless efforts promoting the work of others by sharing some of her poetry with you here. A few Saturdays ago, Jada came over to my place…
Joe Elliot does something that is very difficult to do, he makes a poem funny and sublime and lets it tell a story too, poetry that is not for some, but for everybody. I’ve been wanting to get Joe Elliot on my blog for a long time, and am happy to report that you…
… Mitch Highfill lives on a beautiful out of the way street in Brooklyn that has both sun and quiet. I went over to Mitch’s a few weeks ago to do what I have been wanting to do for a long time, record him. Mitch is a generous poet with an imagination that leaves much…
… One of the nicer things about getting older is that I get to know those I know even better. One of the nicer things too is that one of my friends, Maggie Dubris, sends me a New Year’s Greeting every year, and this year, the times being what they are, I thought that I…
Wednesday, January 8, was very cold and windy, but there was a poetry reading happening at Taylor & Co. Books in Brooklyn that I wanted to get to. It was so bad that the wind coming from the north, as I crossed 10th Street along Avenue C, almost knocked me over and the clear garbage…
… Last November Tom D’Egidio read Three Elegies at KGB. Cookie Mueller, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kathy Acker, and I shared the same time and place in the East Village in the early 1980s before the AIDS and Crack epidemics hit the fan. Beautiful, forever, their energy filled my memory, and I remembered youth. Rest in Peace,…
… Aakriti Kuntal participated in my blog a few years ago, and I thought it was time to get Aakriti and her work back on again. What follows are some of her poems from her new chapbook, God, Am I Your Eyelid?, a reading from that book, some art, and links to her work. I…
… Laurie Price was in NYC not too long ago and I asked her to come over to my place so that I could record her reading from her new book of poems, These Pages Once Were Skin. Laurie Price, a world traveler who is now residing in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a photographer, mixed media…
… A month or so ago, two different friends at two different times in two different places told me that the poet Erin Belieu was reading at KGB, and because I did not know her well, I should go give her a listen. The night of the reading, KGB was packed with the poet’s fans,…
