The New Yorker has a nice essay by Louise Glück which contains this nearly perfect description of revision in poetry:

I agree the term ‘revision’ does seem a little calm. Isn’t much of life also revision?

“Burning the Calendar” was published in the Winter 2021 issue of Rust & Moth. The poem was written after the first year of Covid. I literally fed the months of our 2020 calendar into the fire one by one and watched the year burn, a cathartic excercise. It feels so far off now, yet it was only three four years ago (see how I still get confused by time?) Of course, that was the time of the January 6th insurrection and here we are again, about to re-enter the maelstrom for a second time. One thing I value about poetry is that it helps mark time in an otherwise topsy-turvy world, which often feels like living in Alice in Wonderland.

Read its companion poem “Dear Human” at Rust & Moth.

Here is a fun poem from a couple years back that I published at Inklette. The poem is a light-hearted burlesque on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”, a poem I have always loved and admired. I wanted to preserve the fun of Hopkins’ idiosyncratic verse and its delightful language play, and release it from its religious context. I pray the last line makes that transit explicit. Happy New Year to all reading – may you live long and prosper!

This may be one of the most concise poems I’ve ever written. (Samuel Menashe always said he preferred the term ‘concise’ to ‘short’, and I agree.)

Thanks to editor Rick Lupert for accepting it at Haikuniverse.

My trip to New York City in September was full of optimism. It felt as though the country might be headed down the right path and into a future of dignity and possibilities. I saw Suffs on Broadway with my sister Monica and a couple of poet friends. It seemed to presage an inevitable wave of female voters who would swing towards Kamala Harris and reclaim the country from those who would gerrymander us into some fresh hell, or Gilead. We now know we were wrong, and though Harris lost the popular vote by a thin margin we now have to reckon with the nightmare scenario of a kakistocracy (government by the worst people.) Again. Somehow, we will make it through even this. But who will we be when wecome out on the other side? What will the landscape look like?

I’ll follow up with another post with photos of our side trip up to Maine. I have the best sister ever, by the way!

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”

Here are some lovely – and highly appreciated! – blurbs for Day Lasts Forever. The first is by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote these words in a letter to Mario dell’Arco in response to reading his first collection, Taja ch’è rosso! (1946). Pasolini and dell’Arco would go on to curate an anthology of Italian dialect poetry in the 1950s. It seemed like the perfect encapsulation of dell’Arco’s poetry.

The other generous blurbs come from contemporary American poets and translators whose work I deeply admire. You can find out more about them at their websites: A.M. Juster, Geoffrey Brock and Boris Dralyuk. I thank them for their close reading and the kindness of their words.

*The videos below are in reverse order. Begin with number 11 or jump around as you please. Open in YouTube for the full playlist.

Well, it happened! Four years on from the original date, we made it from the far corners of the earth to give a once-in-a-lifetime reading in New York City at the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village. The lineup was as follows: Barbara Crooker, Marc Alan Di Martino, Maria Lisella, Betsy Mars, Donna Masini, Aaron Poochigian, Bonnie Proudfoot and Alan Walowitz. (Please click the links to find out more about our poets and – most importantly – read their poems and maybe – yes, maybe! – even buy a book or three.)

I’m practically out of breath from this whirlwind week in my beloved New York, which I hadn’t seen in 19 years. My sister and I walked literally miles a day, from Chinatown through SoHo up to the High Line and way over to W. 47th to see the remains of Gotham Book Mart. We ate falafel at Kwik-Meal, bagels on Grand St., dumplings on Mott St. and japchae in Koreatown. We made new friends and saw old ones for the first time in decades. We reconnected with family. It was magical, as only New York can be at the right moments. It felt like I had never left. It was, in a word, serendipitous.

My deepest gratitude goes out to everyone involved in this project who chipped in their precious time and energy to make what began as an offhand proposal a granite-and-steel reality. Grazie!

***REMEMBER TO VOTE BLUE UP AND DOWN THE TICKET ON NOVEMBER 5***

I’m thrilled (yes, thrilled!) to announce that in just over a week I’ll be reading some poems with an insanely talented group of poets at the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, just a stone’s throw from my first rented room in the city at age nineteen!

Feel free to drop in and hear some words if you’re in the neighborhood. Be there or be…octagonal? Below is a poem about what it was like to live in Greenwich Village in 1995 from my collection Still Life with City. (Content warning: roaches!)

Reader, I am thrilled to announce that Day Lasts Forever – Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco is forthcoming from World Poetry Books this November! You can pre-order a copy at the above link if you want to ensure that the book reaches the widest possible readership. Here is the press release, with the gorgeous cover by Italian artist Renato Guttuso:

This book has been 20 years in the making! Read a sample poem here. Below is a portrait of Mario dell’Arco by Romanian artist Eugen Dragutescu: