Food is almost too easy a subject. Everybody has something to say about food. Some people never stop talking about it. Sometimes we realize we’ve become those people ourselves. ‘And the food? You can’t believe the food.‘ It’s our definition … Continue reading →
Boston’s North End, an Italian-American neighborhood for a hundred years, was hopping on a Tuesday evening last week. The neighborhood’s new book store, I AM, hosted a program that included long-suppressed film footage of the Sacco-Vanzetti funeral march, a reading … Continue reading →
I’ll be speaking on my novel “Suosso’s Lane” at the I AM bookstore, 189 North St., just off Revere Square in the North End of Boston, on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m. A new store, I AM describes itself as … Continue reading →
I had a professor, and a very good one, who once spoke about “the poetry of the ineffable.” That’s a word for what’s all around us but cannot be easily named or defined, if at all. Common as the air … Continue reading →
Looking backward, looking forward. Both directions giving similar signals. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, whose real-life journeys of commitment and tragic ends are the basis for my fictional account in “Suosso’s Lane,” took place 89 years ago on Aug. … Continue reading →
There are many mysteries among the poems that delighted me in July’s Verse-Virtual (http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html). Michael Minassian’s poem “The Fortune Teller” reads like a deep parable with too many possible meanings for any of us to sort out simply. It features … Continue reading →
I’ll be speaking on my novel “Suosso’s Lane” and reading a few excerpts at the Paul Pratt Memorial Library in Cohasset, MA, next Saturday, July 23. With terrorist attacks, attempted coups, and right-wing targeting of immigrant groups, 2016 is growing … Continue reading →
My poems about Greece are up on Verse-Virtual.com, the online journal that publishes a big batch of new poems every month.Here’s the link for the poems: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2016-july.html Greece is both a country with an ancient civilization and, judging by our … Continue reading →
Among the many notable poems in July’s Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal, John Allman’s urbane postmortem on a bizarre historical-poetic footnote, “On the Removal of Whitman’s Brain,” tapped me on the shoulder and commanded attention. According to Allman’s note on … Continue reading →
What kind of person was Bartolomeo Vanzetti? According to the people who knew him, he was kind, courteous (especially to women), loved children; he was a talker, a dreamer (“he should have been a poet,” a friend said), a bachelor … Continue reading →