© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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, … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 2021 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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 … Continue reading
© 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