© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I knew that Lamont Steptoe had had a book published through a PEW Fellowship, Crowns and Halos, and I wanted to document him reading from it. My archive of Philadelphia poets would never be complete without the addition of … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I can’t imagine anyone not liking Ching Ho Cheng’s psychedelic paintings. They are exciting and capture the hallucinogenic times of the late 60s and the early 70s when vision was everything, and in your face, and now. Henry Geldzahler … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Quem recitas meus est, o Fidentine, libellus: …sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus. Fidentius, when you recite my little book …badly, it becomes yours. ………—Martial … I went down to Philly to record Jim Cory in his lofty … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I attended (and recorded) the panel discussion of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, a work of art she did in July 1971 that included shooting a roll of film everyday and writing everyday as well recording what was going on around … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Allen Ginsberg told me once that if you want to know what a book is about, simply open it at the middle and look down. I didn’t do this with Kazim Ali’s new book, Uncle Sharif’s Life in Music, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I like to walk, and I like to think as I walk, and I have read and even written as I’ve walked, though I usually stop when I start to write. Walking, even without the writing, has its stops, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I have some happy news. On October 2, new paintings by Robert Rhodes will be featured at Radiance, 9 West Grant Street, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They are night paintings and will be up for the autumn including fourteen oils … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Poetry in Philadelphia was a seminal experience for me. I found the Waste Land in a used bookstore on Locust Street in my teens; I read Walt Whitman there in my early twenties, and returned to the city in … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I met the artist Ching Ho Cheng through my friend Patricia Kelly when we moved to New York City in 1979. Patti and Ching had met in Paris years before. He was always a gentle task-master who’d want to … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … I caught Kaveh Akbar reading in Bryant Park last summer at an event for Sibling Rivalry Press and was enjoying the reading so much I took out my iPhone and recorded the last poem. I’d recorded him before … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Patricia Kelly and I moved from Philadelphia to Manhattan in August 1979. We stayed with our friend Marcia in a huge space she shared with several others near Houston and the Bowery. Marcia, at the time a lunchtime waitress, … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Once I was very sick with pneumonia, had the temperature of 105 for several days, and my brain was as burnt as eggs fried in a pan, but as I lay there in a rank sweaty fever expecting death … Continue reading