Monthly Archives: February 2011

Not a Pretty Picture: Writing in Museums

When Djelloul Marbrook told me that he did some of his best writing in museums, I pictured him on a padded bench in the Met, one of his favorite places, engrossed with his notebook or his laptop, as I’ve sometimes … Continue reading

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That City/Country High

From the late 1980s well into the 1990s, I led a bifurcated life: my career, my marriage, and my social life anchored in Hoboken, then Manhattan; my romantic spirit given to weekend day hikes in the Hudson Highlands reached by … Continue reading

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Poetry Advice

I’m rereading The Great Gatsby which floats above us on Fitzgerald’s exalted lyrical prose style. A sample in the early pages brings Nick Carraway into Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s mansion on East Egg: “We walked through a high hallway into … Continue reading

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The Mysterious Mr. Good

Maybe I’ll never meet Howard Good. He teaches journalism at SUNY New Paltz and writes poetry in a whirlwind that has produced twenty chapbooks plus several full length collections. Yet in all my travels to local poetry events I’ve never … Continue reading

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An Oscar for Best Insect

I’m partial to Jo Pitkin’s “Luna Moths” for several reasons. It describes an animal visitation experience not unrelated to my own “My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse.” And it features a creature I’d nominate as the most beautiful I’ve … Continue reading

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Susan Deer Cloud’s Cure for Revisions

An early valentine arrived from Susan Deer Cloud, her new book Braiding Starlight, a collection of poems about friendship, not friendship as a sacred bond or anything so poetic as that, but friendship as it’s actually lived in 3 am … Continue reading

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An Invitation to Readers

Now I begin blogging. At first I thought of this endeavor as a Hudson Valley poetry blog to showcase our region’s writers. But it won’t just be poets from this area. Nor just poetry. But it will things that delight … Continue reading

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