from current issue of Soundings East
A Large Gray Area Richard Hoffman My friend, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, is singing to me. We’re in my study and across from me, in the other chair, he is singing a song he loves in Arabic. He has a beautiful voice and it’s clear to me that he enjoys singing. When I […]
Keynote, National Writers” Union Boston Annual Meeting, 2 February 2025
Thank you for having me here, today. It’s entirely Charles Coe’s fault. Who can say no to Charles Coe? Raise your hand if you can say no to Charles Coe… I didn’t think so. Anyway, bear with me, I just got new glasses. It had been about 7 or 8 years since my last prescription […]
ARBOR VITAE, An essay from Remembering the Alchemists
“Trees are Earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.” — Rabindranath Tagore My neighbor across the street wants to cut down the tree in the front of her house; she says its roots are compromising her foundation, and besides, she wants more sun so she can grow flowers in her front […]
Inter-Review
The Intimacy of The Personal essay Richard Hoffman and Steven Harvey Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 228 Pages, Paper, $20.00 Richard Hoffman, Remembering the Alchemists The Humble Essayist Press, 2023. 270 Pages, Paper, $19.00. Richard Hoffman [RH]: I’m eager to talk with you about our two books in relation […]
I thought of this poem almost as many times this week as children died of starvation in Gaza
“SO WHAT” Here is a tiny weapon, devastating, undetectable. Here is the switch to turn off the world. The demise of an ancient question; the voice no longer rises, and a black hole, antimatter, widens like a desperate pupil in the sudden dark.
Backtalk & Backlash
I’m including here, in its entirety, this essay about memoir, from Remembering the Alchemists: BACKTALK AND BACKLASH: The Aims, Impact, and Value of Memoir “To employ a textual structure which cracks wide open the whole literary convention of an age seems in more than one case to be the only means by which truth and […]
Mosab Abu Toha update
It appears that Mosab and his family have crossed into Egypt and safety. A great relief.
D(r)one, from People Once Real, 2023
D(r)one What was done was donein our names; we ourselves would never have donewhat was done to anyone. We wanted to be good,polite, obedient, fun, wanted only not to needto ask What have we done? And yet, in our names,what was done was done.
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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