Don Yorty

Twelve Postcards

I like making things, and since my husband Akram’s drawings often fit my poems perfectly, I’ve made postcards out of them. In the time of an inundating Internet and a pandemic, postcards are something physical that a friend has … Continue reading →

Nine Poems by Lewis Warsh

26 Oct ’20

In a box looking for something else, I found a stapled mimeographed magazine called UNITED ARTISTS FIVE that was edited and published by Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer in 1978 when they worked together as United Artists living in … Continue reading →

John McCullough reads from Reckless Paper Birds

24 Oct ’20

Reckless Paper Birds, wow, when I saw that title, it immediately appealed to me, coming out of the ether as it did one day on the Internet. Even in a pandemic, we communicate. I got in touch with the … Continue reading →

Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads from Late Work and Around the Day in 80 Worlds

30 Sep ’20

I’d been wanting to get Rachel Blau DuPlessis on my blog for a long time. In Philly at Temple University in the mid-seventies where I was studying Latin, French and Spanish, I heard her read a sparrow poem inspired … Continue reading →

A Dozen Paintings by Emily Carr (1931-35)

29 Sep ’20

I wonder if, when Emily Carr went as a young woman to study painting in Paris in 1910, she might have read the sonnet, Vers dorés, by Gérard de Nerval that ends: Souvent dans l’être obscur habite un Dieu caché;Et, … Continue reading →

7 Postcards

10 Sep ’20

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 … Continue reading →

Murat Nemet-Nejat reads from Io’s Song

1 Sep ’20

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 … Continue reading →

Ed Sanders reads some really good poems

30 Aug ’20

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. … Continue reading →

Seven Books

4 Aug ’20

… … I … … I will only write about books that are on my bookshelves now; if the book is not here, then I won’t mention it, so I won’t be mentioning books like The Idiot, which may have … Continue reading →

James Baldwin by Carl Van Vechten

2 Aug ’20

… On September 13, 1955, Carl Van Vechten photographed the fairly well unknown James Baldwin who had just published his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was already … Continue reading →

Bamboo Pavilion: Chinese Poems and Paintings by Joanne Wang and Alfred Corn

1 Aug ’20

… Bamboo Pavilion is a beautiful jewel of a book. Chinese poets like Du Fu and Li Bai are translated by Alfred Corn with paintings by the contemporary Chinese artist, Joanne Wang, the present and that past in a really … Continue reading →

Timothy Liu reads from Let It Ride

30 Jul ’20

… A year ago I got in touch with Timothy Liu and asked if I could record him reading from his new book, Let It Ride, which was coming out in September. Well, one thing led to another, and we … Continue reading →