Featured | RICHARD HOFFMAN

Posted by rhoff1949 on March 15, 2011 in Featured

Our PEN New England panel with music critic and novelist Bill Flanagan, poet and lyricist Paul Muldoon, and singer, songwriter and musician Paul Simon is available for viewing here. Great talk about writing and music, with a couple of poems from Muldoon and two Paul Simon performances, including a song from his new album not […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on March 10, 2011 in Featured

Chris Hedges, telling the truth about our current political, economic, and moral predicament. The picture when he connects the dots is devastating, but essential to understand if we are to begin to think clearly and outside of the conceptual boundaries set by the corporate state. Watch this! It’s about 45 minutes long. Less than an […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on March 4, 2011 in Featured

SORRY BOUT THAT Adrian Mitchell Truth is a diamondA diamond is hardYou don’t existWithout a Barclaycard Sorry bout thatSorry bout thatEven South African copsDo the sorry bout that They showed me the world and said:What do you think?I said: Half about womenAnd half about drink And I’m sorry bout thatSorry bout thatMother I need that […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on February 2, 2011 in Featured

THE TIME I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT J. Stephen Rhodes Introduction by Leatha Kendrick Wind Publications, 2008 The time to which the title refers is the day of the poet’s daughter’s suicide, or the day after it, or the day after that, etc. Nothing can be said about the experience of living in […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on January 27, 2011 in Featured

A POET’S PROGRESS: READING ROBERT GIBBONS Who among us has not dreamt of a particular prose, a poetic prose which could translate the lyrical movements of the mind, the undulations of reverie, the leaps of conscience? — Baudelaire In his essay “Training For Poets”, H. L. Hix writes, “Poetic inspiration occurs not upon the occasion […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on January 22, 2011 in Featured

For the time being, I am going to post poems I like here. That simple. Sometimes a photo of the poet, or another image to accompany the poem. That’s all. A kind of poem-a-day, except that I’m not foolish enough to think that I will actually post every day — I’m just too busy! But […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on December 15, 2010 in Featured

Listen to PEN New England’s Tribute to Howard Zinn on WGBH Forum Network. At this event, PEN New England presented our 2010 Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award to Zargana, poet and comedian imprisoned by the regime in Burma/Myanmar. Here is an op-ed I co-wrote with Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International. TEARS OF A […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on December 12, 2010 in Featured

Just finished reading one of the most affecting, thoughtful, and pitch-perfect collections of short fiction I’ve ever enjoyed, Please Come Back to Me, by my colleague and friend Jessica Treadway. Here is a review with which I wholeheartedly concur. Don’t miss this one!

Posted by rhoff1949 on December 10, 2010 in Featured

Thanks to Thom Bassett for bringing this follow-up article by Glenn Greenwald to my attention. This is more than another article on Wikileaks. It is an analysis of the corrupted role of American journalism in ensuring that we remain ignorant of what our government, in collusion with other powerful interests, is actually doing. In the […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on December 9, 2010 in Featured

A friend wrote to say that Assange has done some dangerous things, putting people’s lives at risk. I don’t know where he gets his information. Is Wikileaks as dangerous as the mainstream media parroting what governments and megabanks feed them? Just where are those weapons of mass destruction? Glenn Greenwald has a great article about […]