Iran, a reading list Women’s Voices Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatemeh Keshavarz City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran, Ramita Navai Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, Shirin Ebadi Until We … Continue reading Iran, a reading list
“Beware; I am Fearless and therefore Powerful”- Mary Shelly Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein? Yet … Continue reading Mary Shelly, on her birthday August 30
Passion, madness, chaos, and the looming primordial darkness from which we emerge, but also a poetry of liberation, transgression, the sacredness of nature, and a renegotiation of gender and identity from which new possibilities of being human may yet arise; Ted Hughes is a trickster who wears many masks. A revolutionary feminism and … Continue reading Ted Hughes, on his birthday August 17
On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years … Continue reading June 14 2023 The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday June 14
“Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.” ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice Beautiful words questioning the value and pursuit of Beauty, like an Ourosbouros as a narrative swallowing its own tail; Thomas Mann uses disease and death as metaphors of … Continue reading Thomas Mann, on his birthday June 6
A connecting rod between the generations of his model Gustave Flaubert, his mentor Ezra Pound, his collaborator Charles Olson, and the Beat Generation poets of San Francisco who claimed him for their own, Robert Creeley was instrumental in freeing poetry from its cages of formal structure, an extension of Walt Whitman’s invention of an American … Continue reading Robert Creeley, on his birthday May 21
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels … Continue reading The True and False Crows: a fable
Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day. Act One A definition of terms, or What is Poetry? First before all must be the true names of things. Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. … Continue reading March 21 2023 On Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human
“The writer’s job is the job of a clown, the clown who also talks about sorrow.” Kenzaburo Oe Rabelaisian grotesques of realism which tend to the transgressive and surreal revolutionary visions of de Sade and Akutagawa; antiheroes branded with public shame as if with the Scarlet Letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and heir to … Continue reading Kenzaburo Oe, on his birthday January 31 2026 revision
Metaphysical fantasies, Surrealism and dreams, a Quixotic tilting at authoritarian power structures, the world as a prison of the flesh and a web of treacherous illusions, varieties of truth and lies, madness and the ecstatic liberation of consciousness as well as the possibilities of re-editing humanity through chemistry and allied to the psychedelic-Surrealist mission … Continue reading Philip K. Dick, on his birthday December 16 2025 revision
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 