WHAT I SAW, HEARD and THOUGHT

Saturday Afternoon

On the several block walk from second Avenue to Avenue B there's a wall - long stretches of construction boards plastered with posters and sometimes graffiti, behind which lies a wasteland where once many buildings stood and housed a neighborhood.  Plans for some mega high rise action are in the works.  Meanwhile:

The First Amendment
chalked by someone local I think.

 Advertising posters for
"Survivors Remorse"

Starz cable TV network, is going forward with the comedy "Survivor's Remorse," a half-hour scripted series from LeBron James, Tom Werner, Mike O’Malley, Maverick Carter and Paul Wachter.

The show is set in the world of professional basketball and explores what happens when you make it out.
It's getting a six-episode first season that will premiere this fall. 

Then, retreating from sunlight, I entered the bar called 'Otto's Shrunken Head'--yes there is one--and passed into the back room where Quincy R. Lehr, whose most recent books are Heimat (2014) and the forthcoming The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar (2015). His work has appeared in numerous venues in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, and he is the associate editor of The Raintown Review. was hosting the reading

with John Foy, whose first book is Techne's Clearinghouse (Zoo Press). His poetry is featured in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press) and has appeared widely in magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Criterion, Parnassus, The Raintown Review, American Arts Quarterly, and Barrow Street. His work has also been selected for the Poetry Daily website, Kin, Umbrella, linebreak, The Nervous Breakdown, YARN, and other websites. He has an MFA from Columbia University and has taught writing at Harvard Business School, Columbia, and Barnard. His essay-reviews have appeared in Parnassus, Contemporary Poetry Review and other publications, both print and on line, and he has been a guest blogger for Best American Poetry.

George Green, whose book of poems, Lord Byron’s Foot, won the New Criterion Prize in 2012 and the Poets’ Prize in 2014. His work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Poetry 180; 180 More Poems; The Best American Poetry 2005, and 2006; The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets; and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds. Green grew up in western Pennsylvania but has lived for over three decades in Manhattan’s East Village. He teaches at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx. In 2014 he received an award for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Rick Mullin’s epic poem, Soutine, and his first full-length collection, Coelacanth, were published by Dos Madres Press in Loveland, Ohio in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His book-length poem, Huncke, was published by Seven Towers in 2010. He has two chapbooks, Aquinas Flinched, published by the Modern Metrics imprint of Exot Books in 2008, and The Stones Jones Canzones, published by Finishing Line Press in 2012. His work has appeared in several journals, including Epiphany, American Arts Quarterly, and Measure--with Meredith Bergman in the foreground, and David Katz behind him.

Amy Lemmon, the author of the poetry collections Fine Motor (Sow's Ear Poetry Press 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen 2009). Her poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Barrow Street, Court Green, the Journal, Marginalia, and many other magazines and anthologies. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has contributed articles to the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry and the Facts on File Companion to Twentieth-Century British Poetry.ABBA: The Poems, a chapbook Amy wrote collaboratively with Denise Duhamel, is available from Coconut Books.


Though I missed the shot, Amy Glynn's work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2010 and 2012. Her collection A Modern Herbal was released by Measure Press in November 2013. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

All the readings were inspiring, and at four O'clock I returned to the street...

noting this poster

for a Gypsy Festival in October.

and this one for the climate change march tomorrow, which speaks to the ethnic character of this neighborhood now undergoing radical change.

A climate change card, a broken egg, and other debris decorates a tree well where no tree lives.

Ironic and sad.  So, home to supper and the last Episode of "the Roosevelts, An Intimate History".
~*~