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:

My poem “Summer Snow” is now up at Gyroscope Review. It’s about our local snowball stand in suburban Maryland, which was a major part of my childhood and a significant Maryland cultural signpost.

The poem was inspired by Tara A. Elliott’s “Snowball” which brought back a lot of memories of that time and place. Poetry is great for that, like a little time machine constructed out of language. You can go anywhere in a poem.

I’ve had two recent poems published in the past couple of weeks. The first, “Self-Portrait as a Salt Shaker Shaped Like a Hasidic Rabbi”, appears in Whale Road Review; the second, “Skylight”, appears in One Art. Many thanks to editors Katie Manning (WRR) and Mark Danowsky (OA) for giving them a home.

I’ve fallen behind with updates! In addition to my essay “The Paradox of Self-Promotion”, I had a new poem published last week at Autumn Sky called “Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”. It’s a cento, a form entirely composed by lines from other poets’ work. It’s actually really enjoyable to write a cento, although it proposes its own sort of challenge.

“Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me
from whose unseen presence the leaves
firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes
abjure all wealth and treasure. In the tempestuous
petticoat, your funeral. And on the day,
in farewell on the terrace, I caught sight
of myself as shadows blur towards the heart of night.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want:
not even to choose any more, only to follow.
Never mind the gossip of the world,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Memory, committed to the page, had broke
deceived into believing in permanence
for soundlessly the never-believed-in neared.

(With lines from Diane Seuss, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Herrick, Wang Wei, Norman MacCaig, Wendy Cope, Frank O’Hara, Constantine Cavafy, Ho Xuan Huong, Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, Moira Egan & Rainer Maria Rilke – more or less in that order.)

Thanks to editor Christine Klocek-Lim for choosing my poem!

I have a new essay up at Mark Danowsky’s newsletter, OMM, about the paradox of self-promotion among small press authors. In it I make the claim that publishers should help writers shoulder the burden of promoting their books instead of outsourcing it to them entirely. Here is a teaser.

There is only so much time in a person’s life, and we are forced to make decisions as to how and what we spend it on. Given the choice between writing and revising new work and promoting my books on the Internet (those people grow tiresome quickly), I will always choose the former. There will never be an upside to shilling one’s book on Instagram for a pittance in royalties, and every time I’ve made a half-hearted attempt at it I’ve felt the bite of shame. Even if I were to sell twenty copies in a calendar year, it would amount to around $40—hardly worth the time investment on my part, or the corrosive effect on one’s pysche of spending all that time on social media.

-from “The Paradox of Self-Promotion”

If you want to read more, please check out the original article on OMM!

My poem “Hey, Joe” is now available at Chestnut Review.

I kill the engine, frazzled by “Hey, Joe,”
how Hendrix jimmied up this old folk tune
which still gets air time on the radio.

The poem actually happened as described – I pulled the car over and began jotting down the first lines on my phone as the song was still playing. I had long been intrigued by the song’s obscure origins, which are ably dealt with in this podcast episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Before Hendrix recorded it in 1966, it had already been done memorably by the Byrds, Love, the Leaves and other L.A. bands of the mid-1960s. As far as I can tell, the ‘original‘ version was by Billy Roberts (no, not Leadbelly.)

I know so many songs like this
which rope you in to their worlds on the sly

then leave you panting with a little kiss
of blood. 

Art is complicated, and I’m not at all sure it should always make us comfortable. “Hey, Joe” is ear candy, but at its center is a dark tale of violence and misogyny (Joe gets away with murdering his woman for the ‘crime’ of running around with another man.) It seemed a worthy subject for a poem.

Here is an incredible live performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 1967.

My micro-chap Love Poem with Pomegranate is now available from Ghost City Press as a free downloadable PDF. (Donations are welcome, of course, for those who believe in tipping creators for their work!) The short collection has a number of ekphrastic poems – poems based on works of visual art – as well as others which are not ekphrastics but are perhaps poems which imagine themselves as paintings, if that makes sense.

I think they did a fantastic job with the cover, too. Don’t you? To those who read, buona lettura!