To the English Learner: If you want to learn English, begin with the verbs. That is where the action is. This is true with any language,...

APRIL 29, 2003 Here I am, a rainy day in Pennsylvania where I’ve been for ten days visiting my folks. Tomorrow I go back to New York and...

July 9th I’m sitting in my hotel room in Wuhan; it’s about six-thirty in the morning. I got up at four, made some coffee and played...

Guatemala Notebooks or Trying to Understand Something for Pat who asked me when he left to keep this journal in his stead The same...

When I was in my early twenties, I took a tent and camped out for a month along Walnut Run, a swift waterfall-filled stream, that...

from NY Chronicles 2001 September 11 Tuesday morning was sunny and fresh, a lovely autumn day that made me happy to be alive as I walked...

When Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo visited a few weeks back, we had a great time talking and recording their poetry too. Here is Steve...

From the very first time I saw the art of Judith Braun, I’ve loved it. Though it changes, the remarkable meditative quality remains. Here...

I … … I will only write about books that are on my bookshelves now; if the book is not here, then I won’t mention it, so I won’t be...

On September 13, 1955, Carl Van Vechten photographed the fairly well unknown James Baldwin who had just published his first collection of...

When I read the poems by Patricia Spears Jones in the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I immediately got in touch with her and asked...

A year ago I got in touch with Timothy Liu and asked if I could record him reading from his new book, Let It Ride,which was coming out in...

Bamboo Pavilion is a beautiful jewel of a book. Chinese poets like Du Fu and Li Bai are translated by Alfred Corn with paintings by the...