Frank O'Hara Reading

"everybody's an authority / in a free land..."

Happy Hannukah, Minions!

"I'll serve her coffee and soybeans"

Leonard Cohen: Musician, Monk, Mensch (1934 - 2016)

"If it doesn't look easy, you aren't working hard enough"

There It Is - H. L. Muller, 1928

Lubin Tinbags

"Poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its "meaning" is of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands, lines of sound drawn in the air which stir deep emotions which have not even a name in prose.  This needs no explaining to an audience which gets its poetry by ear.  It has neither time nor inclination to seek a prose meaning in poetry."

Basil Bunting, 'The Poet's Point of View' (1966), reprinted in Strong Words: Modern Poetry on Modern Poetry, W. N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis, eds (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000): 81

Happy Canada Day, Buddy!

Mrkgnao!

James Schuyler's Live Debut, 1988

This is, I guess, the poetry equivalent of finding the cut scenes from The Magnificent Ambersons in a warehouse in Milton Keynes: incredibly rare footage that resurfaced last year of James Schuyler's first ever poetry reading in 1988, at the DIA Art Foundation.  Schuyler, a poet I've loved for a very long time, was famously reclusive (which is particularly notable given the egregious gregariousness of many other members of the New York crowd), so this reading marks something of an historic event.  The reading's excellent, and there's a lovely introduction by John Ashbery, too.    

Melon 'n' Dome

Lone 'n' Modem
End mole mon
Nom le Monde
London Em-O-Em
Mend no Elmo
Ne do le mm! No!

Morton and Cage

"In the rare case of the vehilcle collapsing"