Category Archives: Odds and Ends

… I became aware of Marc Chagall when I was a teenager in the 1960’s. Many of the artists I discovered then were still alive like Dali, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall too, whose brides, goats, and … Continue reading →

When Robert Johnson recorded “Walking Blues” in 1936, he was working from a version Son House, not the Devil, had taught him. And the great Son House himself was borrowing from a Blues tradition that began after the Civil War … Continue reading →

    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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

  T.S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in 1927, a man of no faith who wanted to find some. Perhaps the faith was already there, the faith, at least, that if he put a pencil to paper, he would create … Continue reading →

  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 … Continue reading →

  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 … Continue reading →