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...
Goodbye to all that…
Into my seventh decade as a published author/editor/critic. Books and little magazines and manuscripts and photographs and ephemera on the 3rd floor have been building up, containing multitudes. It feels like forever that I've been talking to friends and family about...
Deaths and Entrances – the plotless poem
Friday afternoon, February 21 2025 - In the 11th floor rehearsal studio, inundated by Hunter Johnson's invasive score, bearing witness to the Martha Graham ensemble unspooling this episodic quasi-narrative under the impeccable guidance of Blakeley White-McGuire and...
Margaret Mighty Oak Brackey Prepares to Take Her Leap in Charles Weidman’s Lynchtown
Tuesday evening, January 27th, 2025 - in the Studio at 115 Wooster Street - I was invited by Samantha Geracht to sit quietly (as always) and lend "another pair of eyes" to a rehearsal for Charles Weidman's seven-minute epic, the 1936 Lynchtown to be presented on...
Martha Graham’s Romanticism – Back in the studio @ Gibney – Janet Eilber rehearsing Appalachian Spring
January 15, 2025 - The new years parade by. I lose count of how many times I have witnessed APPALACHIAN SPRING, and have come to understand why -- because a masterpiece is inexhaustible. My familiarity with the enduring content of this dance has likewise expanded...
Jerome Rothenberg (1931-2024)
Half a century ago, when I was living in Buffalo, N.Y., having labored for a PhD in Modern American Poetry, I launched a "little magazine" (as we called them back then) The Niagara Magazine, that I edited and published for eight years. The Premier Issue, Summer 1974,...
Paul Auster (1947-2024)
Reading Paul Auster's obituary this morning in The New York Times, I recall him as a gifted, elegant, cosmopolitan comrade and writer in the late 1970s, when my wife and I were starting a new life in Brooklyn Heights and Paul came over to our place for Roberta's...
Opening night of the Martha Graham Spring 2024 season at New York City Center
Wednesday evening, April 17th - Martha Graham - When Dance Became Modern front and center at the Company's merchandise stand in City Center lobby.
The Rite of Spring transforms the Martha Graham Studio
Thursday evening, March 13, 8:00 p.m., at 55 Bethune Street, 11th floor - The Martha Graham dancers introduce themselves after an incandescent, primal, thunderous, airborne, simultaneously rough-hewn and liquid rehearsal performance. Graham's 1984 re-vision of...
The one and only Lloyd Knight – NYPL Martha Graham @ 100 Symposium
Friday, January 26th, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. in the Bruno Walter Auditorium - Privileged to bear witness to MGDC principal dancer Lloyd Knight's presentation, Martha's Influence - "The Effect of the Necessity" - Hers & Mine, fitting culmination of the ecstatic daylong...