By Laura Grimes
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of my last day at a large daily news organization. So it seems only fitting to reimagine a new, inspiring era of journalism … that incorporates poetry.
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For more than half my life I was a journalist. At least that’s [...]
“We did not believe in God,” Lawrence Howard recollects. “We believed in chicken soup and matzoh balls.”
As Mrs. Scatter has recently intimated, Mr. Scatter has embarked on a quest deep into the wilds of the exotic North American continent, hunting the elusive Snark. Today the Snark sleeps, and it is only sporting for Mr. [...]
By Laura Grimes
I said hello and called her name. She sat on the side of her twin bed, reading an aged book. She didn’t respond. I called her name again. I stood in front of her for several moments. I raised my voice. Nothing. I finally stooped down and looked into her face.
Josephine raised her [...]
By Laura Grimes
The pressure’s on. Mr. Scatter, otherwise known as my current first husband, has hightailed it outta town, and his responsibilities mean he probably won’t have a chance to write or find a wi-fi to post for about a week.
But you’re in luck. Before he left town, he got up early to write this [...]
Benedict Nightingale, reviewing the new London theater season for the New York Times in 1999, put his finger on the big trouble with Rose, Martin Sherman’s one-woman play about an 80-year old Holocaust survivor sitting on a park bench in Miami and remembering the high and low points of her extraordinary life.
“Rose’s life sometimes seems [...]
“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”
Ms. Alsop is Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony (and, early in her career, of Oregon’s Eugene Symphony) and she’s being quoted in this morning’s New [...]
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage against the dying of the light with a well-mixed martini in your hand.
In a recent post about a Vox spoken-poetry performance, Art Scatter mentioned in passing “the magician’s drone of listening to the likes of W.H. Auden reciting his own work.” That phrase caught the attention [...]
On Saturday night Mr. and Mrs. Scatter went down to the industrial east Willamette waterfront, to Waterbrook Studio, the little theater-in-a-warehouse just north of the Broadway Bridge, to catch Poetry Off the Page.
It’s the latest in Eric Hull’s Vox series of staged — I almost want to say composed — poetry readings. Composed, because it’s [...]
That prominent inhabitant of Chez Scatter, the Large Large Smelly Boy, recently visited the barber for the first time in close to a year and had his lordly lion’s mane buzzed off. The shearing revealed, to our surprise, the makings of muttonchops: a good pair of sideburns settling in. We see a chin crop in [...]
Mr. Scatter apologizes for his recent silence. He’s been a little scattered.
One of the things he’s been doing is reading The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton, the philosopher of art who is also founder and editor of the invaluable Web site Arts & Letters Daily.
The Art Instinct talks a lot [...]