By Little and Little
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant…
Category: Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine
Anne, Allen, You, Me
National Poetry Month This Day of April 21, 2022Today’s poem: Anne Waldman, Notes on Sitting Beside a Noble Corpse Where would I be without Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg? In my own Shimmelstoy way, I…
Brecht 101 (NPM, 4.15.22)
Dear Ruthie, Have you ever read Brecht? He was one of my influences —I stole a couple of lines from “A Worker Reads History” and used them at the end of “A Mindful Rant for…
June Journal 2019
Hanna Krall: “All my books are about how very good human beings can be, and about how very bad they can be—something we are constantly discovering over and over again.” Chasing the King of Hearts,…
Being Present (Somehow)
1. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who…
Mentshes/4
Share the Wealth with Andrew Wimmer: Julian Assange in Conversation with John Pilger “You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is…
The Reading Life/2
By the Blue Light of a Cell Phone by Katie Consamus Dr Chmiel, I just flipped on CNN after getting home from rehearsal and immediately thought of our encounter on New Year’s Eve as I…
An Alphabetical List
The following is an alphabetical list of topics and/or possible chapter titles for a book I was working on in 2011. At this stage, it was autobiographical. It eventually morphed and became the novel, Dear…
Gleanings and Connections
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics—An Anthology Dear Layla: “modernist textual montage/collage of a wide-ranging array mixing the personal and the historical” Dear Layla: “Ezra Pound’s Cantos gave me a way…
Putting Marginalia to Use
for Danielle Mackey Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces 31 Saturday October 2009 I reread this book for one reason: To see if it could help me generate some ideas as to form and content…