Weeks before it happened, I had heard about the Black Square Editions book party that was scheduled to take place at the signs and symbols art gallery at 249 East Houston. As the day approached, I looked forward to it as a sign that the […]
Category Archives: Odds and Ends
Two Sonnets and Three Drawings
158 Like the dried up dead wasp with its venom gone rolled up on the windowsill like a ball of dust my mother slumbers with her head bent near a bowl of fruit Pat Maples sent listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing, a […]
Wayne Koestenbaum reads from The Cheerful Scapegoat, Camp Marmalade, and Ultra Marine
In October Wayne Koestenbaum read at the Segue Reading Series at Artists Space in Cortlandt Alley, right off Canal. Lonely Christopher, the curator and host, introduced him, and is letting me include his introduction here. His introductions are so well-read and insightful, all I need […]
Celebrating Paolo Javier’s O.B.B.
On Saturday October 17 there was a reading at the Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens in celebration of Paolo Javier’s new book, O.B.B. (The Original Brown Boy), hot off the presses, published by Nightboat Books. A lively group of poets, artists, film-makers, colleagues […]
Jonathan Wells reads from Debris
On Monday night, November 1, I went to KGB to hear some poetry. Jonathan Wells was the featured reader. I didn’t know his work (there is a lot I don’t know) so when he got to the microphone, I was ready to listen with interest. […]
Ash Wednesday read by T. S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church in 1927, a man with no faith now having to find some. Perhaps his faith was already there, the faith, at least, that if he put a pencil to paper, he would create a […]
Charles Bernstein reads from Near/Miss
I am a slow reader and come to a lot of books slowly too, but if you live long enough, as I seem to be doing—so far, so good—good books, or books that I enjoy do come. Such a one has been Near/Miss by […]
Laura Cronk reads from Ghost Hour @KGB Monday Night Poetry
I was very moved listening to Laura Cronk read from her most recent book, Ghost Hour. Her childhood and my childhood have similarities. Although she grew up in Indiana and I grew up in Pennsylvania, I could relate. Her poems were like seeing an […]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock read by T. S. Eliot
The first poem that anybody reads who must read something by T. S. Eliot—I think of high school teenagers—is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Perhaps, like those who first read it, the poem is young. Many people love it. Its Michelangelo couplet, […]
Inauguration Poems, 1/21/21, curated by Dorothy Friedman
For this past January’s inauguration, after so much stress beforehand including armed insurrection, Dorothy Friedman gathered some poet friends together the day after the official celebration for a Zoom poetry reading. This reading is captured below on the Vimeo and some of the poets […]
Etheridge Knight reads Feeling Fucked Up
Etheridge Knight wrote some great poems, up there with the best of them. He mastered an African American oral tradition called the Toast. The improvisations of Rap today are a continuation of that tradition, and like the Blues with its roots in the work […]
A Kiss and a Sonnet
Last year I sent out a few Valentines, my poem “In the Circle,” and one came back with a kiss. Those lips are Shelley Kraut’s. Here’s to love, everybody. Mmmmwwahhhh! 219 I want to write something about you butI’m […]
