– In the 1790s, fifty-two residents of Farmington, Connecticut, chiseled their names onto a rock in the forest. They had just received inoculation for smallpox. Infected by the virus and then quarantined for days, they had time to kill. They socialized and received a few visitors on a large, flat rock, now known as Hospital Rock. The clinic would have been nearby. The assumed location of the clinic and site […]
– PY: I understand you were visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, when you came across the painting “St. Dominic de Guzman and the Albigensians.” Can you talk about the experience you had with this painting which eventually led to your poem “Whose Mouth is Fire”? PA: I have a habit of writing poems in response to paintings—I’ve written several in response to trips to The Getty Musuem and LACMA, which are both […]
– Thank you to everyone who stopped by the Poor Yorick table at the AWP 2015 Bookfair in Minneapolis. Thank you also to those of you who took the time to view our 1932 Vogue magazine and write a 6 word short. Here are some of the shorts. Apologies if I mispelled names or if I didn’t give someone credit—I had trouble reading some of the writing! Contact me if […]
Phillip Aijian’s poem glows with the human soul and burning books.
– [What] kind of life [is] possible for a young woman who has come of age on the last vestige of the frontier…who has absorbed its values…lived up to its harsh physical demands?…Such a young woman can never accept the constraints of a traditional female role and yet she can never fully assume a male role…what space [can she] claim and what air is [hers] to breathe…? —Mary Clearman Blew […]