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We’re a month out from the official publication of Vernon Duke’s PASSPORT TO PARIS AND LOS ANGELES POEMS. Glancing again at his account of his family’s desperate flight from Odesa, I think of the people in Odesa today—and of those in Palestine and Tehran, swept this way and that.

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From Amy Lowell’s Keats bio, quoted in Carl Rollyson’s excellent Lowell bio. A heightened but not inaccurate description of poetic creation—goes even for light versifiers like me. LLMs can create poems that read as well as some of Lowell’s; the difference is that they don’t need to.

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“… a life with just a cup more gentleness. They aren’t greedy.”

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[Veille] Dernier n° de 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦 en hommage à "la noire" de Gallimard Perso, je vais me délecter avec cet article de Boris Dralyuk, poète, traducteur, critique littéraire et professeur à l'Université de Tulsa (USA): "proposition de généalogie du noir en poésie"😎

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BOOK REVIEW; "The Silver Bone" by Andrey Kurkov, Translated by Boris Dralyuk. Andrey Kurkov is a celebrated Novelist of Ukraine. We follow a young Samson Kolechko as he juggles courting Nadezhda and becoming a police officer in 1919 Kyiv. Very well written and utterly absorbing.

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It’s a sight to behold!

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It’s Bloomsday! Occasion for binging on Guinness! Just don’t go impinging on John Butler Yeats or other such mates, as did Jamesy and Oliver St. John.

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"much like any other land, except bullets for ten dollars a box." How many times do we have to scream it? Graveyards full of children and it never ends. Nobody deserves their life cut short by gun violence, dreams unrealized. A beautiful, haunting work on an unfortunately always relevant topic.

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“… I know bodies—restless, reasonless, / knots and rocks of aches and wants I’d kneaded down, each within the reach of a bullet …” A poem for today, about a woman who had sought a better life.

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When in Byzantium…

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I’ll have some news to share about my dear Alexander Voloshin and his mock epic of exile in Hollywood, SIDETRACKED, in July. In the meantime, here I am, casting anything but a cold eye on his final resting place at Hollywood Forever.

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I’m reading poems at Miceli’s in Hollywood tomorrow night, right off the Boulevard. Drop in if you can and forget your Angeleno woes, like the couple in Vernon Duke’s poem!

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Rest easy, Mr. Brian Wilson. “But one old song, a stretch of empty road, / Can open up a door and let them fall…” — Dana Gioia

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As I drive down beautiful LA’s dustiest streets, thinking of the hatred aimed at the city, I remember another poem by Pillin, from 1978, in which a grouchy angel changes our speaker’s perspective: “…reality is random and misleading / unless changed in the eye…”

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say Thou to anything (❤️!!!)

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Born, like me, in Odesa, the poet William Pillin (1909-85) was raised in Cleveland and Chicago, and spent the last decades of his life in LA. He wrote beautifully about the city, often with great humor, but it is this poem from a 1954 issue of POETRY I want to share.

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Congratulations to Erin O’Luanaigh, whose “Comedy of Remarriage”—one of three poems in the Summer 2025 issue—was shared on the Best American Poetry blog! (Stanley Cavell couldn’t have said it better himself…)

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“He would come, sooner or later, ruffled and drenched dark with rain, one wing broken by the storm, his feathers tattered and filthy, his tail black with tar, a castaway crippled by the sea’s fury, a deposed, greedy sovereign: he would return to rule over that shattered realm.”

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Today I reread Edwin Rolfe’s (1909-54) PERMIT ME REFUGE, published posthumously by the California Quarterly. Born Solomon Fishman, Rolfe fought in Spain with the Lincoln Battalion and died of a heart attack in Hollywood, blacklisted. “…drunken stars in their shrinking orbits…”

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As @uilleamblacker.bsky.social writes at the end of his review, the lesson is universal.

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Oh, this is sweet and hilarious and will never happen again: Annie and I had the #2 and #5 best-selling books in Oklahoma last week, based on four bookstores in the state. I guess that reading in Tulsa was worth it! Thanks @bdralyuk.bsky.social.

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Not ashamed to admit that @uilleamblacker.bsky.social’s @theatlantic.com essay on Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries, the third volume of which I am currently steeped in, moved me to tears. A rare privilege—for authors, translators, anyone—to be so well understood. www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

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Poets are pulled towards fixed forms by various forces. Not uncommonly, it is the need to harness, if not to tame, an unruly tangle of thoughts and sentiments. Result: a fine tension. In a late sonnet, Millay takes this as her theme. Recall also Bishop’s parenthetical “Write it!”

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A crackerjack piece of detective work and cultural history.

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Dragged old H. Phelps Putnam out for a trinc (sic) at a place he’d have liked. “O Jesus, Hasbrouck, am I drunk or dead?” (Berryman picked up the tumbler where Putnam dropped it…)

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“… and once, for me, John, dream your groundbird soul / into the frame of this brown pelican …” Richard O’Brien communes and commutes with John Clare.

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Biopic starring @natashalyonne.bsky.social when?

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Hey Tulsa! Come hear me read from #Pioneersummerbook (by Kateryna Sylvanova and Elena Malisova) with @derekmong.bsky.social (reading his own poetry) hosted by @bdralyuk.bsky.social! Much gratitude to the Tulsa Artists Fellowship and Magic City Books for their support and organization.

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This poem of biological and geological insight thinks beyond our time—rather, sees our time clearly, as a fragment of a long history. Those who seem to inherit the world are only inheritors for a moment. Extinction visits all our houses.

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If you're looking for a book event in Tulsa on Friday, May 23rd, look no further than this! I know Annie, Derek, and @bdralyuk.bsky.social won't disappoint, plus there will be tea and sweets.

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment