… In early December of last year, Pamela Sneed was scheduled to read from her new book Speaking Tongue at 7 PM at Dashwood Projects in the East Village. The book is a vivid series of water colors done while in Africa that ends with an epiphany of a poem. On the day of the…
… I’ll take this bottle with me when I go. Not now. Some hiker dropped it passing on Impossible Hill, a mountainside of stone made visible by human heels and hooves Sharp and steep. Don’t fall! Below is Walnut Run Above, the power line. Buzzards one by one take off from steel and wire…
What follows is a lesson plan introducing High Beginner ESL students to the Past Tense, the simple past and the past progressive. The activities are for both group and individual work. And the answers are given for the exercises. Here is the printable PDF for the exercises: Exercises for Yesterday Morning I Fed…
The penultimate event at the Bryant Park Reading Room on September 3 featured three poets, Jiwon Choi, Joan Larkin, and Alicia Ostriker. I know and enjoy the work of Joan Larkin and Alicia Ostriker and I partly came to the reading because I wanted to record them. It seemed important. I didn’t know Jiwon Choi…
… A few months ago, I heard David Groff read from Live in Suspense, his most recent book, at the Jefferson Market Library. The poems were very visual, and philosophical, a bit like parables, with existence itself as the theme; and they were easy to follow—I don’t mean this in a bad way—what I mean…
… The song I sing in the video is from Leadbelly. He called it “Black Girl.” I’ve changed some of the lyrics and added the end from another song, “Prettiest Train,” which Odetta sang on her Carnegie Hall record album. I loved both of these songs when I was a teenager. “Black Girl” was one…
… I hear Dad’s chainsaw echo down the fieldcutting firewood for December’s stove. Herknife in hand Mom chops the cabbage she’ll sealin jars pouring boiling water overit first with a tablespoon of sea salt.Come November she’ll have her sauerkraut.Summer yet, but going, and not the faultof summer that it goes. I want to shout“Don’t go!”…
… I met Harry Kresky in the late eighties; he was my lawyer, or I should say he was the lawyer for the community. Without going into too much detail, or I’ll be writing a book, Harry defended a Lower East Side community park called La Plaza Cultural in city, state, and federal courts from…
O Pretty Self A snake curled in the sunfeels my shadow come and goesripples over stones. The stream falls downand oozes out of mossand mud where a deer’s stepped. No, I won’t pick this violet.Let it clutch the cracking rockblue out of yellow from a black dot. When I leave these woods to workand stammer…
36 I see how strong a fragile thing can be. Look! A butterfly comes fluttering over its own reflection hovering out in the middle of a pond so deep and close you’d think no insect strength could last the distance needed to reach land, yet up it goes above the wide-mouthed bass that jumps…
… Fluttering robins louder than my singingare violent on the lawn where they’re fightingover a worm—No!—I’m wrong. As quietas a junkie gets sticking the needle in no matter what funny business preceded it—Like a junkie suddenlysilent one bird enters the other shooting the life force so still it makes me stopplaying to watch what I…
