“It is difficult/to get the news from poems” – a lesson from William Carlos Williams
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs - by Renee Nicole (Macklin) Good i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores...
Amanda Seyfried’s Testament (2025) & Doris Humphrey’s The Shakers (1930)
Thrilled at all the well-deserved attention for director Mona Fastvold's sensational new film, The Testament of Ann Lee, starring the luminous and daring Amanda Seyfried, her frenzied devotional swirlings bringing an 18th century religious icon to life -- in the same...
Richard Serra @ Gagosian – Meditations on the Monumental
Thursday afternoon - December 4 - Gagosian - 522 West 21st Street - NYC. I've lost track of the number of times I have seen the work of Richard Serra. One memory leaps to mind: A sunny afternoon in May, 2007, I am walking east from Sixth Avenue along 54th Street when...
In memory of ARCADIA at Montclair State University. November 18-21, 2009
November 29, 2025 - Recalling with melancholy and exultation the life and works of Tom Stoppard, who died today, I thought of the production of ARCADIA that the Department of Theatre & Dance presented sixteen years ago at Montclair State University, directed by...
Christian Boltanski at the Jewish Museum – “seeing my work…somebody that I don’t know…is going to be sad for two minutes…”
...and indeed, emerging from the elevator at the Jewish Museum in NYC at mid-day on Friday, November 14, 2025, I came face to face with this striking piece by Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) -- an artist I have admired over four decades for his elegaic, memory-laden...
MG at the Salmagundi Club – Fifth Ave – NYC
Wednesday evening, October 22, 2025 - On the occasion of the third anniversary of the publication of MARTHA GRAHAM - WHEN DANCE BECAME MODERN what a delight to speak at the venerable Salmagundi Club/Coffee House, in animated conversation with my editor at Knopf,...
PRIDE AND PLEASURE in many ways at the Morristown Festival of Books
Saturday, October 11. 2025, mid-day. My bemused friend and literary comrade Amanda Vaill is seen here poised to sign copies of her new book, Pride and Pleasure - The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution at the Morristown (N.J.) Festival of Books, where she was a...
A fabulous “MARTHA GRAHAM 100” book party at Apparatus in Chelsea
Friday night, October 9, 2025. Dancers Ane Arieta and Leslie Andrea Williams display their exuberant esprit de corps in celebration of the just-published lavish, eye-popping, monumental MARTHA DANCE COMPANY 100 YEARS, a labor of impeccable love by photographers Ken...
My joyous introduction to The Brooklyn Rail
October 1, 2025 - My first invitation to join Phong Bui and likeminded friends -- and he says it best: "The Beauty of Friends Being Together: What a joy to see our brilliant friends the other day at Rail HQ in Greenpoint where I hosted a another delicious lunch...
MAN RAY at the MET
Friday, September 26, 2025, 9:30 a.m. - What an extraordinary privilege, thanks to the friendly generosity of Carol Shuster-Polakoff and Phong H. Bui, to bear witness to Man Ray: When Objects Dream, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 1, 2026....
Remembering Linda Hodes – June 3, 1931-August 1, 2025 – with gratitude to Marni Wood.
"I talked to Linda Hodes and she would be delighted to meet with you," renowned Martha Graham Company veteran and founder of the UC Berkeley Dance department Marni Wood told me on June 10, 2014. Marni and I had chatted over coffee (at her favorite spot, the now late...
March 21 – UNESCO’s World Poetry Day – a prediction from Czeslaw Milosz
A poem worth pondering, chosen in a time bearing witness to the invasion and destruction of our institutions. In the essay collection The Witness of Poetry (1983), Milosz stresses the importance of Poland's cultural heritage and history in shaping his work. “My corner...