As I read The Sauna Is Full of Maids by Cheryl Fish, I was constantly reminded of friendship. There are countries I’ve visited that became my friend, Mexico and China come quickly to my mind; those two countries and I shared days as only […]
Category Archives: Odds and Ends
Lamont Steptoe reads Etheridge Knight
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 Etheridge Knight, Lamont contributed. This […]
Jet Wimp reads new poems
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 […]
Cliff Fyman reads from Taxi Night
In the city that never sleeps, Cliff Fyman drove a cab all night creating poetry from what he heard his passengers say. I’ve enjoyed hearing these poems over the years. Happily they are finally a book called Taxi Night. I went over to Cliff’s […]
Joanna Fuhrman reads from To A New Era
On the Vimeo below, Joanna Fuhrman reads poems from her new book, To A New Era, published by Hanging Loose Press. I edited her twenty-four minute reading from the hour long Zoom book launch that took place on Saturday, April 17. The poems are […]
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 […]
The Prologue
a mouthsewnshut can stillmakeasound before you love anotherlook in a mirror until you don’t existthen smash the mirrordrink from your bleeding fist In the circleI’ve pressed my lips. If you press yours there toowe will have kissed. […]
Diane Seuss reads from frank : sonnets
A month ago, I attended a KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading on Zoom whose featured readers were from Michigan and California. Diane Seuss, the poet from Michigan, I had never heard before and was surprised and taken by her poems; I could hear and […]
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 […]
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 […]
