Best American Poetry- On Kenneth Koch, "Dr. Fun" [by Melanie Rehak]"May I tell you how much I love your poems?" Frank O'Hara crowed in the first stanza of a tribute to his friend Kenneth Koch in 1953. "It's as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped/along which all personal characteristics/are making a hasty departure. Tuba? Gin?/...O Kenneth Koch!" Koch's memories of his writing met […]
- Said Disraeli to Gladstone. . .At a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease." Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress." Related StoriesPerils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]
- Flying Into the Unpredictable: Publishing During a Pandemic [by J. Chester Johnson](ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl) My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuste […]
- Greg McBride: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]__________________________________________________________ Sizes My sister found our father’s ring, turquoise faded, sullied silver-plate. It stopped my breath. Thirty years ago I took it from his cold hand. A big man, he never took it off, not when he dug or swung or swam, or smeared on huckleberry jam, or held a cribbage peg […]
- On Kenneth Koch, "Dr. Fun" [by Melanie Rehak]
- World Literature Today
- Lost and Found in Translation: Storytelling and the Untranslatable, by Michał RusinekEssay Photo by Eileen Pan / Unsplash “Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an anecdote, a metaphorical footnote.” We all spend a lot of time at airports. After having some coffee and browsing in shops that used to be duty-free, I always like to […]
- Two Poems from Dear Specimen, by W. J. HerbertPoetry Illustration © Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation Fragile Eagle The La Brea Tar Pits’ Page Museum displays fossils of extinct & extant species. Eyes, glistening hollows. Blackened claws. Breast bone sunk between scrawny haunches as if you’re squatting by a campfire, though your tailbone’s a comb for a countess, tines shining w […]
- River, by Du YaPoetry Photo by Wayne S. Grazio / Flickr In spring of the year I turned twenty I looked for a river river calm and wide that I believed to be my past incarnation. Since childhood, I’ve seen it many times in the blink of an eye, in dreams but I could only glimpse it in flashes before it faded back into nothing. River flowing alone across the earth – what moon […]
- The World (Is a Book) According to Peter LaSalle, by Ellie SimonBook Reviews Photo by andy lapham / Flickr Whether he is recounting his nighttime drive with a late colleague and poet around the beltway of the pulsing and vibrant São Paulo—a city so full of people and culture that it seems to have its own gravitational pull—in the form of a mournful elegy, characterized by piercing prose and sorrowful nostalgia about thei […]
- Lost and Found in Translation: Storytelling and the Untranslatable, by Michał Rusinek
Category Archives: writing
Birthday
You entered the light Unknowing yet unafraid You will leave light blessed
April 30 Haiku
The wind is blowing On this spring day in April Healing the painful
April 28, 2021
Up this day with Revelry On fullness smile In sing-song soul
April 18 – Lockdown
The sky The trees The bird The grass The screen The glass The sill The chair The face The tear Til Turner 2020
Posted in Prose and Poetry, writing
Tagged Covid 19, lockdown, loneliness, longing, poetry, word associations
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