understanding my connection to Shez’s poetry

As I’ve been doing final (for now) edits on my translations of Shez’s poems, I keep feeling a kind of haunting—some of her words could be my own; I could definitely interweave the translations and my poems into a single, unified text. Sometimes I even dream about having my work translated into Hebrew and then [...]

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New Work Up

I’ve started a new set of pages for my craft essays and poetry reviews, accessed through a new tab at the top of this page. First up are two essays using Scott McCloud’s theory of transitions from Understanding Comics to consider how poems are sequenced in collections. If you like comics or syntax, you’ll probably [...]

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On the Omer and counting

A piece I wrote several years ago, “For the Sake of the Innocent Fifty”, has been brought back to my mind this week because so many members of my Jewish tribe continue to believe and say such racist, horrible things about Palestinians as a people. Arguing the facts of 61 years of dispossession is never [...]

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To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee Emily Dickinson 1755 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

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Manly Sappho

quotations from various ancient sources about Sappho, as listed in Willis Barnstone’s translation Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho [She was called] “manly Sappho,” either because she was famous as a poet, an art in which men are known, or else because she has been defamed for being of that tribe [of homosexuals]. from Porphyrio, in [...]

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The Night of Her Insistence

The Night of Her Insistence Nancy Reinhold, 1997 She finally understood it, the sadness of her life the weight of her emotions, the gravity of light She looked into the back of her mind to see where she had been But all she saw was a secret and she could not look in All those [...]

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one of the privileges of considering poetry

from the Footnote to the Translations in Mary Barnard’s Sappho translation, in which she is reviewing critical writing about Sappho’s life: “…However, when we come to consider the sense of the poetry and the human relationships, we should, I feel, have the privilege of tentatively rejecting any theory which outrages common sense.” I would argue [...]

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new work is up

Too many beers (2, actually, but that seems to be 1 too many), too much busy head after dinner with ex-coworkers, awake in the middle of the night, trying to work on something serious about Cain or Lot’s wife, and this is what I get — Marlena “Doc” Evans Brady Black. Check it out on [...]

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Bee Stories for Z.

Stories about bees told by a friend of mine to her toddler. Linked here solely because they are so delightful, and I am trying to find my delight in a tough week. Read here: Rhymes with Javelin

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bees and billiards and blooms

more bees, this time from my friend Carol Burbank. You can find the entire poem to the right, under “Guest Poets” then there must be something to tell in all the silence of the bees and billiards and blooms that make the day hum and click

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