Every Small Thing Is A Reflection of the Whole

This post could also be called "When Elephants Lose Their Teeth, They Die"or a few other gems that I heard from while listening to Ish Klein and Greg Purcell's No Slander podcast.

Episode 5 features many wonderufl things, including talk of Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes, the digestive system, and a healing session. There is also a reading from me.The reading is from UMass Amherst's Visitng Writers Series where I read with Michael Earl Craig in Novermber of 2010.

Check out the entire No Slander website and their podcast.

And for closure, Natalia Goncherova's  design for a stage backcloth for Le Coq d`Or, 1919, 

Bella Akhmadulina

“She was one of the great poets of the 20th century,” said Sonia I. Ketchian, the author of“The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina” (1993). “There’s Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam and Pasternak — and she’s the fifth.”





“When a young person comes to ask me, ‘Should I, should I not, write poetry?’ I say, ‘If there’s a choice, don’t.’ ” - B. A. 


Akhmadulina passed away last November. I kept meaning to read this little piece about her. She seems someone I should have read before now. So now I will, just in time for poetry month.

Looking Forward

Julie Choffel's Figures In A Surplus is sure to be a beautiful read. Here is what the editors of Antioch Press, who published Choffel's chapbook, had to say about her work:


In this new collection, Choffel’s sparse poems present images and actions not as extant material, but as nebulous plans and ideas. She wields the subjunctive mood with aplomb, creating branching futures whose possible outcomes wait, just off the page, for cues that will likely never come. In twenty-three poems, some of them no longer than a single line, Choffel encompasses salt, other planets, and the amoebae, zoologists, and skyscrapers that lie in between – a world far too intricate and dense to hold any room for certainty.

On long lapses and reviews and new-s

A new GlitterPony (#12).

A new review of Try A Little Time Travel, this one by J. Mae Barizo, in the new issue of Sink Review (thank you!) (Ben Fama's Aquarius Rising is reviewed as well!)

A new venture (it's almost ready).

A new year. Happy (belated) new year!