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Recent Work
From Blue Peninsula
“My son’s illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others.” read more
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Archives
Blog Archive
Paul Newman on Sixth Avenue
August 8, 2009
The second volume of New York stories from Mr Beller’s Neighborhood website is available. “Paul Newman on Sixth Avenue” and many others can be read in Lost and Found: Stories from New York and online at www.mrbellersneighborhood.com.
Poetry&Things Past—OPPC in Darien
June 24, 2009
On Wednesday, July 1, at 7 p.m., the One Page Poetry Circle at the Darien Library will meet for the first time. In keeping with the library’s Adult Summer Reading theme, The Good Old Summertime”, our first circle will draw on and launch from the theme “Poetry and the Past”. All are invited to come and bring one page of published poetry as well as curiosity, enthusiasm, and questions about what the OPPC is and might become. read more
Not for poets only
March 24, 2008
Take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says. What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others’ light, stained by each others’ shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out… read more
Goldwater Poets
February 3, 2008
During my first Winter and Spring in New York, I volunteered with NYU’s Goldwater Writing Project, a writing workshop for students from NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and residents of Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Sharon Olds started this unique and exciting program in 1984. (for recent information, click here). read more
YouTube
November 22, 2007
Michael Braziller, Karen Stone, Alicia Ostriker and I discuss Poetry and the Self—click here.
Sweet Permission
October 30, 2007
At the end of October, Michael Braziller, Publisher of Persea Books, Karen Chase, Alicia Ostriker and I sat around a table to discuss “A Sense of Self: Poetry in Therapeutic Contexts” as part of the Poetry Program at Philoctetes. read more
When You Get Them Laughing…
August 30, 2007
The last Tuesday in August, I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the neighborhood enjoying lunch with Ike and reading Coney Island of the Mind, I thought, for escape, when I read again “I Am Waiting.” Two days earlier I had written about the extended diagnostic testing period we have just entered and considered it likely that no one enters joyously such a long period of waiting (see “Waiting II”). Ferlinghetti’s poem had been lying in wait. With it came the best sort of serious-funny surprise and a connection to so much beyond the two of us. read more
An Imagined Divide
August 8, 2007
For an engaging read about the pilot program putting poetry into the life of Harborview Medical Center, see this July 5th article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. read more