Michael Simms: Daisy
After you died, I pulled a copy of Gatsby
From your shelf — torn, underlined, smudged
With marginalia — but still beautiful
In an unbound unglued sort of way.
Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise
One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.
Robert Frost: The Fear
A lantern light from deeper in the barn
Shone on a man and woman in the door
And threw their lurching shadows on a house
Near by, all dark in every glossy window.
Jason Irwin: On the Road to Bushmills
Because of a parade, the road to Bushmills is closed.
It’s the only road that leads to Portrush, a town
less than nine miles away, where we’ve been told
there’s a laundromat.
Joan E. Bauer: Great Art is for Everyone
Papp was a communist, raven-haired, charismatic,
His mission: free Shakespeare for the people.
He borrwed lights & props, scrounged for costumes.
Even his wife didn’t know Yussef Papirovsky
began as a tough street kid in Brooklyn.
Jose Padua: This Curved Road Toward Space
The last time I was charmed
simply by someone’s good looks
it was something like 1963.
Barbara Crooker: Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis At Shoprite,
The bass
line thumps and grinds, the honky tonk piano moves like an ivory
river, full of swampy delta blues.
Audio: Jack Gilbert reads his poems
Reading poems from The Great Fires, some of them in earlier versions, Jack Gilbert looks back on the loves and solitudes of a life lived acutely, seen in terms of the Pittsburgh steel mills where he worked as a youth
Kim Ports Parsons: May the Particles of My Body Travel the Endless Conduits
When I die, lay me in the loam under the big oak
on the path through the woods, deep down in the endless
flow of talk among the trees there…
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Purple Carrot
These are lonely times.
No sweetness lingers on the tongue
from this carrot’s purple flesh.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Religion
I am no priest of crooks nor creeds,
For human wants and human needs
Are more to me than prophets’ deeds
David Kirby: Taking it home to Jerome
Everything else was to come, everything about love:
the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken.
Video/Audio: ‘Imbolc/Vision’ a film poem by Grace Wells
Imbolc marks the beginning of spring, and for Christians it is the feast day of Saint Brigid, Ireland’s matron saint.
Mel Packer: The Bend on the River Road from Homestead
A falling down, bullet-pocked sheet metal wall
Once erected to mark the edges of the
South Side Jones and Laughlin steel mill
