A journal of rediscovery
– On a recent Saturday I traveled two hours to drop off my son and his friend at their weekend drum corps practice. I took a detour on my return trip to visit Wisdom House, a retreat and conference center located in Litchfield, Connecticut and home to what is believed
Continue readingSkull Talk: Labyrinth’s Ancient Practice in Modern Life
– Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Dwight never mentioned keeping a war diary. My great-aunt Helen, his wife, found it in a locked desk drawer after he passed away. It’s a
– 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
– 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
– 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
– [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
Continue readingFamily History Series: Reading Between the Lines of a 1907 Excelsior Diary
– As a hippy Boomer mother of a Millennial bride-to-be, I have rediscovered the obscure, yet expensive, costs associated with apparently mandatory wedding attire such as the bridal veil. Unbeknownst to me, over the past thirty-five years, the veil has become, or has been reinstated as, THE bridal must-have fashion
– The wooden ancestor tablet presiding over my fourth uncle’s ancestral altar tells the complete history of my father’s family—a history that I didn’t discover until my mid-twenties. Early in my life, my father wanted to plant the seed of imagination and poetic lineage in my mind. On the eve
– Last week, when I’d had it up to here with working on my graduate thesis, I wandered off down the Internet’s rabbit trails and ended up reading about England’s bog bodies. Gross, I know. Apparently Northern Europe is littered with peat bogs which over thousands of years have accumulated
Continue readingSkull Talk: Bridges Among Death, Time, and Art
– Poor Yorick: A Journal of Rediscovered Objects in collaboration with our partner, the Danbury Railway Museum, is spotlighting a caboose from the Museum’s collection. How does this object inspire you? Please submit your responses to us. We accept all forms of literary genres and electronically reproducible visual or audio
Continue readingSpecial Call for Submissions: April 3, 2015 – June 19, 2015