Essay
After the Ash-White Wind
Robert C. Hardin
9/11/01: 8:54 a.m.
My shift has ended and I’m sitting at my computer, finessing a letter to Swedish musician, Tomas Pettersson. Looking out of an eighteenth-story window off Maiden Lane, I notice what might have passed ...
More...
Gerard Petrus Fieret: Lurid and Exalted Photographs
Greg Masters
The women are posing, yes. But they are not engaged in a casual flirtation with a man who has persuaded them to return to his studio with him. I am supposing that the ordinariness of their day in a small town in Holland has ...
More...
Poem
Three Poets, Three Books — Café Crazy, We Became Summer, and Blue Lyre
William Considine
Café Crazy, by Francine Witte
We Became Summer, by Amy Barone
Blue Lyre, by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
On Wednesday, June 13, three well-known Downtown New York poets read together from their new books, published w...
More...
Essay
John Ashbery – an Oblique Remembrance
Max Blagg
I was introduced to John Ashbery's poetry in the summer of 1971, by a beautiful young American poet living in London. We met at a church jumble sale in Belsize Square. Her flat was across the street. I woke up on her couch l...
More...
Essay
Sixty
Patrick O'Neil
There is nothing easy about turning sixty. The days whip by in a whirlwind, kids look younger, and you can’t understand what they’re even talking about. Cops, bosses, and doctors could be your daughters and sons. Films a...
More...
Poem
VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY
Jack Hirschman
VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY
You, thunderer and swirl of
the flag of blood and roses,
kneader of the bread of poem,
deathless comrade of dithyramb
and liberty,
you whose suicided life
I carry as a forge,
...
More...
Enthrall & Squalor: Photographing Downtown 1977-1987
John Weed
“Walking home at night was taking your life in your own hands.” Or so said one of the subjects of the documentary Blank City, about life in the East Village in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. (By 1990, your...
More...
Poem
Dawn Patrol
Max Blagg
Dawn Patrol
Lord I am risen from that misery and I wait for you
Like the sleepless man waits for dawn
The light was up at 5.45 am and I rose to meet it
first hours of the day filled with rain
lightning over Montauk so...
More...
Poem
after cecil taylor concert
steve dalachinsky
after cecil taylor concert
sing not song but string tuned harp(ie)s-chords
lyric rhyme well constructed chaos nite –
now a room floats about us
enfolds & possibly loves us –
a completi...
More...
Poem
125th Street
Carl Watson
125th Street
Once there was a Harlem of the mind,
In a New York of green youth and mystery,
Steaming manholes, fevered sleep,
When I was a pilgrim without ambition.
Characters with metal teeth and top hats,
Sn...
More...
Poem
Fake Lies
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
FAKE LIES
The donor class is warping the loom.
Domination is damnation.
Defiance is a shortcut to de-finance.
We have to scrap for all that’s left.
Make of your suffering, charms.
The best things are free (like me...
More...
Poem
Wallace Stevens Loses His Job
William Considine
Moment in flux: Tuesday, February 8, 1916.
Place in passing: 55 Liberty Street, Manhattan, New York City:
a new tower, the Liberty Nassau Building,
Liberty Tower, first called the Bryant Building for
William Cullen Bryan...
More...
Blade Runner 2049: The Enigma and Exegesis of ‘K’
James Reich
Zwei Selle wohnen ach! In meiner Brust. (Two cells live in my chest.) ... I must go on being a Christian, acting out the role of a genuine revolutionary apostolic Christian, as a strategy: in order to overthrow the Black Iro...
More...