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I've been thinking about ancestry and roots, and how we get to the places we find ourselves. Rafael Alberti had Italian and Irish ancestry but his home was Spain. He was a painter, a playwright, and a one-time Communist,...
I saw a painting a couple of weeks ago in New York, at the MOMA. I
didn’t note the artist’s name; I didn’t take a snapshot with my phone. If I’d
known how much it would linger in my consciousness, I probably...
I realized this morning that I haven't featured a male poet for a while (oops!). So here's a good one: Charles Wright, named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2014. Biographical information on this esteemed writer...
Claudia Emerson is best known for collection, Late Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. These poems were inspired by the dissolution of her first marriage, the solitude that followed, and her second...
Recently, I read a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s essays
called Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Aside from the fact that I really love that term—“occasional prose”—I
also have been known to love me some...
New York City has inspired countless writers and because I'm spending a few days here this week, I thought I'd share one of these inspirations. Anna Hempstead Branch wrote much about her beloved city, including this poem,...
Judy Halebsky is the author of two poetry collections, Sky=Empty, which won the New Issues prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award, and Tree Line, which is new and discussed here.
On the Coast...
"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka
