Joan Eardley painted children in the slums of Glasgow and then lived in Catterline, a fishing village nobody went to. She found beauty in the often shabby common present. It is what I admire about her. The paintings below were painted in Catterline on […]
Category Archives: Odds and Ends
The Prologue
What better way to start than at the beginning. These will be the first poems in my new book, Fucking and Other Poems, which will be published soon by Indolent Books. Till then Enjoy. words are birds eye is sky […]
Francine Witte reads some Charley Poems
I’ve heard Francine Witte read her Charley poems on several occasions, and I’ve always enjoyed them, so it had been on my mind to ask her to read them for the blog. Charley is a man (the many men) the poet has dated, and […]
Hound Dog
Hound Dog, a twelve-bar blues by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, was first recorded by Willie Mae Thornton on August 13, 1952 in Los Angeles. I, whose birthday was on August 15, would have been turning three at the time, and have no recollection […]
Sparrow reads from Small Happiness and Other Epiphanies
It’s the little things, the good word, the bon mot that come down to us. “Festina lente,” the Emperor August used to say: “Hurry slowly.” Words I try to live by. Other words to try to live by can be found in a new […]
The 17th Annual Brevitas Reading
It has been several years now since Tom Savage asked me to become a member of Brevitas, an online poetry group that posts fourteen line poems, or shorter, twice a month, on the first and the fifteenth. It is a unique sharing where work […]
Ron Kolm reads from Swimming in the Shallow End
Ron Kolm gives a lot of energy to the current poetry scene in NYC. He adds to his archives at the NYU Library, continues to publish others at The Unbearables, and collaborates with artists and writers, too, recently editing Brevitas 17, the yearly publication of […]
Lynne Sachs reads from Year By Year Poems
I heard Lynne Sachs read for the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series on Zoom a few weeks ago. She read from her new book, Year By Year Poems (2019), which is a beautifully put together publication by Tender Buttons Press. In it she chronicles […]
7 Postcards
Back in the early 1980s, my friend Stephen Spera began to make poetry postcards for me. And then I took over the enterprise. Now I work on a lot of sonnet postcards. Here are seven non-sonnet postcards with the first five from an earlier time. […]
Murat Nemet-Nejat reads from Io’s Song
In Io’s Song, some of the poems are as beautiful to look at as they are to listen to and read. I have always been a fan of poets whose first language isn’t English, but who speak and write the language because when a poet begins […]
Ed Sanders reads some really good poems
In high school, my classmate, Mary Kopala, had an older brother in college studying for a PhD in Engineering, if I remember correctly, and he brought the record album, The Fugs, home at Christmas for her to listen to. This would have been in […]
Sanjay Agnihotri reads at the Parkside Lounge, 2/2/20
… Sanjay Agnihotri is generous with his time and energy. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Local Knowledge, a literary and art journal, as well as the programmer and host of its long-running monthly reading series in Manhattan. I am going to give him […]
