Category: World Literature

Poem of the Day: Bertolt Brecht

Those who take the meat from the table Teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined Demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry Of wonderful times to come. Those who…

Personality

“Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.” –Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way “It’s very refreshing to shed the personality thrust on you by other people.” –Keith Johnstone, Impro  

Hold It All/37

In the last thirty years of his life, [Jacob] Glatshteyn’s poetry became an incessant, internalized conversation on Jewish history, the lost world of European Jewry, the birth of Israel, assimilation in America, the tragic demise…

Photo Meditation/112

I’ve been reading volume four of Proust’s Selected Letters, translated into English by Joanna Kilmartin. I liked this passage from a letter to a Madame Greffulje– “When you refused me once before, you gave me…

For Laura Lapinski

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, “Poem Written on a Book of Mathew Brady Photographs” Perhaps there’s something waiting in the moonlight to show its face I’m writing on an oversized book of Mathew Brady photographs pictures of…

Forty Years of Letters

Bill Morgan,  I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career:  The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg —1955-1997 I read a lot of Ferlinghetti in the 1980s, and loads of Ginsberg…

Sunday Afternoon

Sitting outside at Stella and Bella’s Cafe The Presidential debate two hours away Reading Su Tung-P’o’s bamboo poem Will Clinton deliver the knock-out blow? On my ballot, I’ll write in: Chuang Tzu –from novel-in-progress, Our Heroic…

Kafka

I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known…