Paul Christensen: The Pandemic Blues
Everyone around here is sluggish. The young woman who checks my purchases off the conveyor belt dabs her eyes and stifles a yawn. She keeps shaking herself awake as the … Continue reading
Video: The unheard story of the Sistine Chapel | Elizabeth Lev
Elizabeth Lev’s experience studying and teaching art has led her to believe that when we encounter something beautiful, we are made vulnerable and opened to the truth.
Video: Hurray For the Riff Raff | PA’LANTE
Winner of the 2019 Jury Award at SXSW, Director Kristian Mercado Figueroa’s music video PA’LANTE performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff takes us inside the Puerto Rican experience of life post Hurricane Maria and the pressures facing an estranged family attempting to reconnect amid the wreckage.
Michael Simms: Heart of Glass
In Herzog’s great visual opera
The hero stands on a cliff
Above a valley where a river
Of molten glass carries
Light to the sea
Doug Anderson: Negative Capability
…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.
Video: Poetry and Immortality in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale | Belinda Jack
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — a lecture by Oxford Professor Belinda Jack
Robert Bernard Hass: Oedipus in Thebes
When he left the palace, the streets were nearly empty
Save for the women wailing at the altar, rending air
With sobs and litanies, the smoke from their incense pots
Thick and fragrant, perfuming the shrouded dead.
Deborah DeNicola: The Death of Socrates
Even the guards listened in
as he taught his eternal lesson,
how to live like a moral human. Politics
back then—as now—rampant, wretched corruption,
a den of sociopaths in sheep’s clothing.
Greg Thielen: As the World Burns
At this very moment, as my pen inks this page, the entire Western United States is scorching. Death Valley recorded a high of 140 Fahrenheit.
Pauletta Hansel: Joy
When we finally sprung my father from the hospital
after days spent staring at the cardio unit’s
cinderblock walls the color of nothing
good, his joy could not be contained.
Christine Skarbek: Konstancin
Konstancin was the turn-of-the-century playground of the Polish wealthy and elite. Weekend trains would bustle the chic out of Warsaw to their palatial country mansions and the casino directly across … Continue reading
Rafael Cadenas: Beloved Country
So much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me.
Country to which I return every time I go broke.
Luke Montrose: There may be dangerous components in wildfire smoke
As dozens of large fires burn, a lot of people are wondering what’s in the air they’re breathing.
Martha Silano: Poem that Begins at the Core
A mother who lived to peel apples,
bake the most exquisite pies. Suffuse the air
with delicious love. A father gah-gah for fossils,
mummies, cow manure.
