From Russian animation studio Toonbox comes this marvelous animation based on a poem by Sasha Svirsky. I don’t understand a word of it but I love the sound of it. I really must find the woman who does the voice-over.  She is just magnificent and totally fearless.  The drawings are fascinating.  The rhythm is catchy.  [...]

In Ronnie Bruce’s short film Typography, poet Taylor Mali lets it all hang out about how people talk today. Hipsters. Kids. Cooliodoolios who don’t want to sound too committal about anything. Every utterance is just a little fart with a question mark at the end. ‘You know?’
I don’t happen to have [...]

In my poetic web adventures I went and found this big long movie by George Quasha about poets trying to tell everybody what poetry is. What is poetry? It’s not an unanswerable question. It’s a stupid question. But these poets do try to answer it. It’s a rather long movie [...]

This is a clip from a documentary film, Meanwhile, a butterfly flies, about filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He shares a few thoughts about culture, country, poetry and what those things really are.

Poet John Ashbery has published a new book of poems called Planisphere.  Boy, I hated this guy’s poems a few years ago.  But I kept reading them because of some instinct for self-inflicted mental damage.  And I kept reading him.  Not understanding him at all.  But I liked the words as they passed me by.  [...]

I am a clipped in user
of information keyed and shining
on a glass partition with an ascending
staircase behind the twitching
lozenges
My fingers hunt
the sleek and they twirl
along the draped wires
to find the pressed-in
prong which is
bent
You cannot throw me
or catch my attention
from the sideview
just remember
that I passed the pickup
and won
Number crunchers adore me
because the arguments
are bluffing really
people don’t [...]

Remember the book?  Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had [...]

by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of [...]

by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of [...]

My latest little film. It’s actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn’t exist. You can’t find it with measurement. You can’t even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is [...]

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For the last day of National Poetry Month 2009, here’s a reading of Ode to a Nightingale, by English poet John Keats.  It was written in 1819 after the poet had been listening to a nightingale in the yard of a friend one morning.
Here is the text of the poem:
My heart aches, and [...]

This is my poem offered in celebration of National Poetry Month.  It’s called Alongside too Soon.