A new episode of “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” just dropped! It’s about Die Zauberflote by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, and this one was a long time coming. I’ve rarely struggled so hard to produce a single podcast episode, or a single blog post.
It was a struggle … Read the rest
Judih Weinstein Haggai, a huge-hearted haiku poet, teacher, mother, grandmother and longtime friend of Literary Kicks, has been missing since October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz near the border of Gaza where she lived with her husband Gad. We have been waiting since that terrible day in hope that Judih … Read the rest
I’m thrilled to announce that “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” is back! Season 4 of this podcast kicks off with an interview with singer and actress Casey Keeler, who played the Fairy Queen in a concert production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” … Read the rest
A mysterious book-length poem called The Princess by Alfred Tennyson became a popular craze in England about a century and three-quarters ago. The title of this book barely hints at the complexity of the story inside — a story within a story, a poem inside a poem, featuring a crew … Read the rest
Jack Kerouac was born 100 years ago today, on March 12, 1922. I wrote a poem about this.
… Read the restThe poets are coming out of the woodwork lately
Called by a voice, and our careworn restless souls
Jack Kerouac! We called you famous for a book
Many of us spend our lives pursuing a certain vision. An idea, a dream, a blueprint. There is something we are supposed to work on, in this life. No matter what we do, and no matter what else we think we are doing, this is what we work on, every … Read the rest
Beneath the Parthenon, on the southern side of the most famous hill in Athens, Greece, there stands today the Theater of Dionysus. Two millennia ago a Dionysian festival gathered here each year at harvest time for a series of remarkable dramatic performances. The great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides … Read the rest
The second episode of “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” is out! This one tells the story of how I turned myself into an opera freak by forcing myself to listen to nothing but opera music — 100 selected arias in random order, eight hours a day every day while I … Read the rest
The audiobook of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born To Run is narrated by Bruce himself. It kicks off with a bizarre, unexpected noise: a slow thundering torrent, familiar but eerily transformed. This is the opening of the great rock anthem “Born To Run” played at half speed: booming drum roll, snaky … Read the rest
