Kenneth Patchen in 1957 with a collection of his painted books, taken on the rooftop of photographer Harry Redl's apartment house ...

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali,in 1967 I could have sworn I had posted the following poem, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a poet whose...

William Carlos Williams In the American Modernist pantheon  William Carlos Williams  (1883-1963) looms large as one of its most impor...

Pierre Boulez, by Carlo Bavagnoli I've been of two minds about the recent deaths of two leading figures in the world of music, Pier...

Say you were born at the start of World War I, the second son and heir to a prominent Northeastern steel company fortune on your father...

Alain Locke, by Winold Reiss, c. 1921 In 1954, Alain Leroy Locke (b. 1885), one of the chief intellectual forebears and anchors of the...

The set, designed by Georg Baselitz and Court Wilson In 1927, two years before the US Stock Market crash , on the eve of the Great Depressio...

Today is Bloomsday , the day that Leopold Bloom  (I almost typed Harold --!) wandered around Dublin , thus providing the plot, slender thou...

For a long time I've loved the poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia  (1903-1950), one of the greatest poets in Mexican  and Latin American l...

Today, after a false morning alarm, which involved the electricity surging on while I was in the shower,    only to shut off not even 10 mi...

So often I'll Tweet things I hope to blog about, then I look up and an entire week has passed without the planned post. I do accompli...