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“Thirteen Maqams” from Fady Joudah (a Palestinian lament)
I’m linking to this extraordinary rage-meditation before it gets taken down for whatever “national security” reason: A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation: Thirteen Maqams for an Afterlife, by the magnificent Palestinian-American poet/translator and physician Fady Joudah. Thanks to LitHub for making it available, and thanks to Louise Glück, wherever she’s traveling these days, for choosing Joudah’s first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007. For anyone interested in the title of Joudah’s lament, here’s a good place to start exploring maqam.Read More
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Emphasis Mine
“[T]he project seemed to hold out, more promisingly than anything I’d embarked on before, a way of bringing forth the few distinct realities I felt to be present inside myself, which is all any writer really has to offer.” —James Lasdun, from “Helen” [The Paris Review, Issue 244/Summer 2023, p. 97], emphasis mine.Read More
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Dance First
Any opportunity to watch Gabriel Byrne in action is one nobody should miss.Read More
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Two Workshops @ the Trinidad Literary Festival
More info here: https://www.jhwriter.com/get-lit-in-trinidad-on-the-historic-santa-fe-trail/Read More
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Get Lit! in Trinidad … on the Historic Santa Fe Trail
I’m very much looking forward to The Fifth Annual Corazón de Trinidad Literary Festival! I’ll be joining some terrific writers for readings and workshops, including PW Covington, Kate Kingston, Kathryn Winograd, Aaron Abeyta, Ginna Pollack & Senora Banana, Lindy Simmons, SETH, Michele Battiste, and the inimitable Art Goodtimes. Join us for all or part of this 3-day event.Read More
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Yuyutsu RD Sharma Reads from ANNAPURNA POEMS
Internationally known Nepalese poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma reads from his book Annapurna Poems at The Bookies Bookstore in Denver, Colorado, on Saturday, August 26, 2023.Read More
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Against Witless Orthodoxy
For more, visit the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. And watch Cheryl Eagan-Donovan‘s fine documentary, Nothing Is Truer than Truth, currently streaming for free.Read More
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A New Interview Published in Compulsive Reader
Thanks by my friend and fellow poet Ed McManis for thinking to interview me in the first place and then deciding to let me run my mouth for so long. Many thanks as well to poet, novelist, radio personality, and proprietress of Compulsive Reader, Magdalena Ball, for publishing this interview from her home base in New South Wales, Australia. You can read the full interview here.Read More
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History Makes Fascist Parents Flip Their Lids
Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the classic graphic novel Maus, continues to inspire panic among the repressive nitwits seeking to ban their children from learning about history.Read More
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Really Writing
When you’re in the room writing, there are a lot of people in there with you. Your teachers, friends, writers from history, critics…and one by one, if you’re really writing, they walk out. And if you’re really writing, you walk out. —Adapted from a talk with Philip Guston Note: Guston’s original comment concerned not writing, but painting. You can read it at Jim Finnegan’s wonderful, aphoristic blog, ursprache. In the photo, Guston is shown working on mural for the WPA Federal Art Project in connection with the 1939 New York World’s Fair.Read More