The basement keeps its single bulb—olive and patient.He sands the edge of a face until the grain sings.A jar of brushes stands like sentries, stiff with dried oil;a moth rehearses the same, small circle around the light. He paints the same jaw three nights in a row,correcting an insistence that will not be quiet.Impostor comes … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Root That Knows the Stone”: On the Stubbornness of Making – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.5
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s briskest and most farcical early play, The Comedy of Errors stages a combustible mixture of slapstick, classical plot-mechanics, and surprisingly tender melancholia. On its surface the play is a tight mechanical farce — two sets of identical twins, mistaken identities, beatings, arrests, and a sequence of escalating misunderstandings — but beneath that machinery Shakespeare … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Window Cracked” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.4
Basement lamp. One face in paint.Impostor at the windowsill with cold palms.He signs the corner and leaves the window cracked—an invitation like a breath into the street.Tonight, a moth maps the lamplight; tomorrow, footsteps might follow.
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As You Like It by William Shakespeare
As You Like It is, at once, one of Shakespeare’s most winsome comedies and one of his most philosophically porous. The play stages a collision between court and wood, artifice and simplicity, and—most memorably—between performance and identity. Its pleasures are theatrical (wit, disguise, comic reversals) but its imaginative reach is pastoral and reflective: the Forest … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Basement Sun” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.3
Basement: damp breath of plaster and turpentine.A lamp pools like a small sun over a half-face—a mouth not yet finished, a jaw undecided.He works until the light invents patience. There’s a calendar pinned above the sink,the months crossed out with cigarette ash.Ideas gather in a cardboard box —old ticket stubs, a hand-scrawled compliment, a smear … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Basement Sun” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's late play is at once a fairy-tale romance, a metaphysical meditation on art and illusion, and one of his most unsettling examinations of power and possession. Its small cast and island setting concentrate moral conflicts into a tight theatrical laboratory: Prospero’s rulership through books and spirits; Ariel’s airy service; Caliban’s earthy resistance; and the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “The Locksmith’s Lamp” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.2
In the basement’s single bulb—olive light—He oils a stubborn canvas till it hums;A moth keeps time against the lampshade’s white,His brush translates the hush of absent drums. He paints a woman who will never leave,A mouth half-open, caught between a song;The floorboards keep each night’s small, private grieve,A stack of postcards—unsent proofs of wrong. Impostor … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Locksmith’s Lamp” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s comic fantasia remains, more than four centuries after its first performances, a small universe where love, language, and theatricality chase one another in circles until witty chaos becomes a kind of logic. In this review I treat the play both as a tightly engineered comic machine and as an example of poetic imagination that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
Winter loosens its grip on the gate,lets the snow slide off like a bad alibi.The ground coughs up its old confessions—knotted string, a split glove, last year’s lie. There’s a tangle of jute in the belly of the bed,leaf bones rattling their thin, dry prayer,a rusted hook humming to the worms,like it still remembers holding … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew is one of those plays that refuses the neat categories critics try to pin on it: at once a farce, a satire of social performance, and an uncomfortable meditation on marriage and power. The play’s comic machinery is brilliant — quick-paced plotting, disguise and mistaken identity, witty repartee — but … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
