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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

Category: POETRY

  • Each From Different Heights, by Stephen Dunn

    That time I thought I was in loveand calmly said sowas not much different from the timeI was truly in loveand slept poorly and spoke out loudto the walland discovered the hidden geniusof my hands And the times I felt less in love,less than someonewere, to be honest, not so differenteither. Each was ridiculous in…

  • Jumbo

    tramples humans knocks over trees for fun tears your eardrums with its trumpet but don't let's mention it, it's nobody's fault   lumbers in with that musty smell breaks the floor with its natural weight shreds the drapes with its tusks but please don't say anything,  it didn't mean to   stop acting surprised you've…

  • Aristotle

    by Billy Collins This is the beginning.Almost anything can happen.This is where you findthe creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.Think of an egg, the letter A,a woman ironing on a bare stageas the heavy curtain rises.This is the very beginning.The first-person narrator introduces himself,tells…

  • What Narrative Is For by Margot Schilpp

    How fine the mind that can calculatechange and recognize destiny, as if luck had something to dowith knowing, as if the lease signed with the eyes closedmeant happiness, or even time that's bearable, slow breaths exchangingthe currency that wanting spends, and how fine that sedativesand jewels exist, those slanted elegies. So there are errands and…

  • embellished

    When I was in college, I used to go to poetry readings pretty regularly. One of my favorite poems of all time was from one of these readings. A guy gets up, kind of nebbishy, shaking a little bit I assumed from nerves, the paper rattling in his hand, tentative voice into the microphone: Relationships…

  • Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy

    When you set out on the voyage to Ithaca,pray that your journey may be long,full of adventures, full of knowledge.Of the Laestrygones and the Cyclopes,and of furious Poseidon, do not be afraid,for such on your journey you shall never meetif your thought remain lofty, if a selectemotion imbue your spirit and your body.The Laestrygones and…

  • shored against my ruins

    Yesterday sitting under a huge tree in a courtyard talking about our favorite poets, as one does, necks tilted back to release puffs of smoke into the blue sky filtering through the green leaves. When I was young I liked the confessional poets and I still will always hold room in my heart for them because I,…

  • Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara

    Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?       Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to…

  • White Dwarfs by Michael Ondaatje

    This is for people who disappear for those who descend into code and make their room a fridge for Superman Who exhaust costume and bones that could perform flight, who shave their moral so raw they can tear themselves through the eye of a needle this is for those people they hover and hover and…

  • The More Loving One (Auden)

    Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving…