Accompaniment/2

Alive beyond Alive My friend Loyola worked at Mount Saint Joseph and knew Pete Mosher. She and I reminisced before Pete’s funeral. Cab Yau picked me up at Loyola’s that morning and we went to…

Mentshes/5

Sign Up by Lindsey Trout Hughes Hi, Mark! I hope this note finds you well. I saw your post last week about the spring writing course. I asked Katie Consamus over coffee if she’d like…

Huzzah!/2

Make Lists Not War Dear Cami, One index of a profitable reading experience may very well be in the marginalia we make. For instance, I read Ed Sanders’ collection of poetry Let’s Not Keep Fighting…

An Actor

Sealing the Deal A couple of months after The Book of Mev came out, I did a reading and signing at at Left Bank Books in Saint Louis’s Central West End. I asked one of…

Gratitude/555

I give thanks for translators whose labors allow me to meditate on the teachings of sages throughout time, like David Hinton’s work with  Confucius’s Analects…   1.16 The Master said: “Don’t grieve when people fail…

Two Ways of Looking at a Plague…

Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour And Other Documentary Poems New Directions, 1980 Dear Chase & Liz, The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal died on March 1. I’m going back over his works this spring under quarantine. I…