I'll be honest: I am not sure the tipping point between someone who is having fun experimenting with poetry and an actual poet, but given the amount of good poetry news I've had in the last year or so, I... Continue Reading →
I wanted to share with you a project I have been working on and published over at Substack. It's called "For Immediate Release: Essays and Lessons From 30 Years in Politics and Government."
One of the marketing tools used by publishers to promote books are book trailers. It's almost exactly what you think it is -- like a movie trailer, a minute or two, with maybe a voice-over, some graphics. I watched a few and decided that I'd like to make my own for Canebrake.
On Friday and then again on Saturday evening, I drove south to the Sarasota Contemporary Dance studio for the first installment of what turned out to be a fantastic collaboration. My friend and world-class cellist Natalie Helm came up with the idea: Bach Immersion Concerts, a one-of-a-kind exploration of Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. The idea is to present "a multi-sensory interactive live performance," and that's exactly what happened.
Read it when the anthology is published, and more important, read the work of the winners and support literary journals and magazines whenever you can.
“Whatever it is,” Jim says. “It can’t be bad enough for you to want to get it through who knows what the hell past the Black Line.”
Also want to urge you to see the documentary on Mister Rogers, if you have not already: Won't You Be My Neighbor? It really is something special, the best thing I've seen on the big screen in a long, long time.
It’s true. The strong kid, laser beam girl, iron-skin guy -- they have all been rumors for so long. Took better than a dozen years, but I finally got a source on the inside. No one too high-up, no one special. But I got blurry pictures and some details out of it. Once that was out there, my site blew up. Just a matter of time before there was a knock on the door.
The place, though, isn’t as bad as the noises I can hear on the other side of the wall in the first stall. I wouldn’t admit this to just anyone but it would give me nightmares. If I slept.
benjamin j kirby 