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“The Inventors” [by Jim Dolot]
The man who invented spitting,Archimandrus of Boeotia,Was otherwise undistinguished,And tends to be underrated and overlookedBecause of his contemporary, Thespis,Who invented the drama, and Gogulus,Who invented existentialism.This is how it happened.There was a drought, and…
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Next Line, Please: Checkmate in 10 Moves [by Virginia Valenzuela]
This week on Next Line, Please, quizmaster Lehman has provided a new prompt: a game of poetry chess in which the first and last moves are already determined, and you, the writer, have 10…
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Impudent Prophetic Plagiarism: 1 – Daniel Brown
I once heard a lecture by the late great critic and pianist (or, as he would have said, pianist and critic) Charles Rosen on two strands of Romanticism: a backward-looking "classicizing" one (exemplified by…
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The Old Grumpus Wumpus: V.S. Naipaul, 1932-2018 (by Mitch Sisskind)
They called him the old grumpus wumpusBut why? Why? Can you please explain thatTo me? Would you be so kind? Did I missSomething? I must have missed somethingBecause for the life of me I…
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Poems and Notes by John Tranter on Hitchcock (and Noir) on Hitch’s Birthday
<<<Hamlet does not utter the words North by Northwest (a compass direction that does not exist.). He does say "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a…
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Beethoven Bites Off the End of a Bottle – Daniel Brown
Beethoven was facing an especially tough compositional problem. He’d just brought off one of the most singular coups in music. The problem was how to repeat it. A little context: The third movement of…
