Category Archives: Odds and Ends

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 […]

Charles Bernstein reads from The Lives of the Toll Takers

  In the Vimeo below, Charles Bernstein reads part of a poem from his book, Dark City that he made for his friend Li Zhimin, a poet and professor at Guangzhou University in China. The excerpt was selected by Li for his anthology Reading Poetry […]

Winter Paintings by Joan Eardley

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]