Arousing Enthusiasm: Allen the Talker

for Laura Lapinski, who makes me laugh while lunching at Medina Grill, walking around the CWE, and hanging out in Left Bank Books There’s 15 to 20 Allen Ginsberg poems I’ve loved, and shared with…

The Irresistible Power of Natural Powers

Having recently perused Jim Forest’s biography and memoir of Dan Berrigan (Playing in the Lions’ Den), I returned to Berrigan’s collection of poems, And the Risen Bread. If I can find five poems in such…

Beautiful and Toxic Multitudes

Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13  I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual –Allen Ginsberg, Yiddishe Kopf Prompted by a recent tragedy, I turned again to the conclusion of Fyodor…

We, Unsubsidized and Unbridled

And it is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. Language is…

Five Poems, Five Passages

Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann, ed. From Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry New Directions, 1964 Guido Calvacanti, Sonnet 7 Saint Teresa d’Avila, Bookmark Elizabeth I, When I Was Fair and Young William Butler…

Transmitting Beauty

Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan Columbia University Press, 2008 The first sentence of George Steiner’s first book (on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) reads: “Literary criticism should arise out…