(This is the fourth and last installment in a short series about the PEN World Voices Festival.) Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to... Continue reading

(This is the third installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival.) Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the... Continue reading

(This is the second installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival.) Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the... Continue reading

(This is the first installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival!) Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the... Continue reading

The Lorca extravaganza continues! Don’t worry if you’ve missed some of the early events that have already happened New-York-City-wide in celebration of this poet of mystery and intrigue. There is plenty more to come. Happenings including film screenings, readings, talks,... Continue reading

Ai’s single poetic form was the dramatic monologue. Her seven books published between 1973 and 2010, collected in a hefty Norton edition released in February of this year, comprise almost two hundred pieces – monologues all – written in voices... Continue reading

Wunderkind/High school drop-out. Gifted artist/Street scribbler. Incredibly successful in his early 20’s/Heroin addict dead at 27. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life was a study in warring forces, forces that fueled both his painting and his addiction, forces that likely did him in... Continue reading

Matisse was part of the Fauvist movement – the “wild beasts” – a group of early 20th century artists known for their brash use of color and their emphasis on manipulation of paint as equal to, or more important than,... Continue reading

In preparation for re-reading The Iliad and The Odyssey with a few friends, I’ve been taking in The Cambridge Companion to Homer and M.I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus. And I’ve enjoyed the insight, the speculation, the scholarship involved in... Continue reading

There were such nice responses both here and on my Facebook page last week when I published my farewell to Mobile Libris, I thought you might enjoy a poem I wrote a few years ago in celebration of our fall... Continue reading

Last night, after a long look at my empty office space, I left Mobile Libris for the last time. It’s been a good run, these past seven years of selling books. It’s a tough business – margins are slim, prices... Continue reading

Dee and I are about to wrap up Paradise. It’s been a long journey, through Hell, Purgatory, and now, The Ultimate: in these last few cantos we are about to meet God. That in itself will make this 18-month endeavor... Continue reading

I suppose my viewing companion and I approached it all wrong. At the Guggenheim, I like to start on thetop floor and work my way down. But the exhibit was arranged chronologically and worked its way up, -- bottom floor... Continue reading

I first fell in love with Cy Twombly’s paintings when I saw Fifty Days at Iliam at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about 15 years ago. The ten large starkly white canvases flame with a narrative of the Trojan War,... Continue reading