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 […]
Category Archives: Poetry
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 […]
Ampat Koshy reads My Favourite Chair and Why I Like It
Dr. Ampat Koshy is a writer and a teacher, and as a teacher— teachers are instigators—he manages several Poetry Groups on Facebook. Though he is from India, and teaches in Saudi Arabia, he has a worldwide audience of aspiring writers who often come to […]
Sonnets 1 through 19 written by William Shakespeare and read by Sir John Gielgud
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, there is another kind of […]
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 […]
John McCullough reads from Reckless Paper Birds
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 poet John McCullough on Facebook […]
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 […]
Patricia Spears Jones reads new poems
… 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 for the virus, I would […]
Bill Kushner reads Neighbor
… 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. Bill was pretty much a […]
