© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
…If you are ever going to memorize a sonnet of Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 may be the one because it is beautiful to say, easy to understand, and anyone with just a little practice can communicate it. Sonnet 18 is one … 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
© 2018 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich … Continue reading
© 2018 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… It’s April. Everything is young and beautiful. But you’re not here. It might as well be winter. You’ve cast your shadow over everything. … From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dress’d in all … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, … Continue reading
© 2016 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer … Continue reading
© 2015 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… At her home in East Nassau, New York, Bernadette Mayer reads a sonnet that she wrote with Philip Good. … … … … … Sonnets is published by Tender Buttons Press. You can check them out here: https://www.tenderbuttonspress.com/ … Continue reading
© 2015 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… My heart is a fancy place Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers & white ones in French & English are outside Waiting to welcome you to a boat Over the low black river for a big dinner There’s a lot of … Continue reading
© 2015 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
….. “TAKING THE HUMBLER PATH” ………for Ron Padgett Was excellent advice from Ron In a dream I fell We were walking in the rush hour Got pushed into a snowbank By a man in a Bentley &climbingoveritIfellinlikeGreek&Latin Scared at … Continue reading
© 2015 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … THE CLIMATE I myself like the climate of New York I see it in the air up between the street You use a worn-down cafeteria fork But the climate you don’t use stays fresh and neat. Even we … Continue reading
© 2015 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… From 1976 until 1983, Jacob Burckhardt recorded and edited Edwin Denby reading from his Collected Poems. Here is Sonnet 8 from A Sonnet Sequence. 8 Three old sheepherders so filthy in their ways Whores wouldn’t touch them with a … Continue reading