BLAZING SLIPPERS

by George Salamon

The choreographer Marco Goecke with his dog 'Gustav' in a photograph from his Instagram account.

Marco Goecke has been suspended from his position as ballet director at Hanover’s main opera house after he smeared excrement on a critic’s face." —The New York Times, February 13, 2023

High culture's going

to the dogs, to the

dachshunds in Germany

this time, where once the

learned scholars

marched step in step with

thugs in brown shirts.

Vulgarity can still be bracing

or honest, at its most violent

expression it often swings

from rhetorical bullshit 

to the berserk Bolshoi 

acted out in Hanover.

George Salamon thinks Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies ever made. The real violence on the Frontier was not too funny, perhaps only to those who conquered it by the gun.

DEATH OF A CRITIC

by Mark Danowsky

Harold Bloom 1930-2019

No one is left now
who will swing his arms wide-----
claim knowledge of the entirety
of The Western Canon

The man who wrote the book
on who the wise among us
ought to remember
has left the stage

Who now can swoop in
to tell us how it is?

Gone are the Great Claim-Makers

More than ever now
we need help knowing
where to look
for what is true & valuable

None of us can claim
to have read everything

Some of us can raise a hand
& solemnly swear
we are up to no good

Many of us can remember
a time when we used to feel
we knew more

Knowledge begets holes
in our theories about this world

The Critic has left us
his anxiety of influence

The Critic has left us
a list of what once signified
our greatest gifts


Mark Danowsky is a poet / writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.