Cheryl Boyce-Taylor meets Nicole Homer. Tickets ordered before the show online are $10 as opposed to $12 at the door! Order Tickets
Join me in New York City for Page Meets Stage on Sunday, March 25, at 6 pm
January 6, 2018 – 1:55 pm
Category: Uncategorized
Mostly German students at a school in Spain wrote me letters . . .
December 12, 2017 – 5:32 pm
. . . about my poem “Totally Like Whatever,” which their teacher, Ms. R. had made them watch and discuss. These were handwritten letters (about 60 of them!) from 14 year olds for whom English is at least a second language! So of course I wrote back, and here’s what I said: Dear students of [Read more]
The 12th anniversary of a very important night in my life . . .
November 12, 2017 – 11:00 pm
. . . is this month. On Saturday, November 12, 2005, I woke up in Copenhagen at the end of a two-week tour of teaching gigs in Europe. That night in New York City I was to share the stage with my mentor Billy Collins at an event that would become the first of a [Read more]
My first wife died 13 years ago around this time of year.
August 8, 2017 – 7:45 pm
Here’s Rebecca on the roof of our apartment on East 22nd Street in New York City in perhaps 2002. This photo was taken by Wyatt Counts, the friend of a friend, and it’s a wonderful likeness. Rebecca called herself “dark and stormy,” but I think warm and troubled is more accurate. But then again, who isn’t that? [Read more]
Does a Good Poem Speak for Itself?
July 11, 2017 – 8:36 pm
Well, no. Because poetry can’t actually speak at all. In which the founding curator of the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club breaks down the difference between the message and the messenger. I sat on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival some years ago called something like Poetry in Performance. Four poets [Read more]
If you’re going to a wedding this summer (or having one!) BRING THIS POEM!!
June 9, 2017 – 8:47 pm
In 1997 or 1998 I lived next to two folks named Michael and Andrea in a massive building on the west side of Manhattan called The Archive. When they got married, they asked me to write and perform a poem at their wedding. I needed an easy entry point to the poem so I chose to write [Read more]
As you get older you become MORE yourself . . .
June 7, 2017 – 1:44 pm
. . . and little quirks become engraved eccentricities, pet peeves become deep assaults on your sense of order. If this is true then my home office will very soon become a small mailing center. Any business consultant who peeks inside my highly organized closet would conclude that I have spent way too much on [Read more]
Dark & Cerebral? Apparently that’s me!
May 26, 2017 – 3:55 pm
Most people who know my work wouldn’t think to describe it as “dark and cerebral,” would they? At least, not compared to most of my contemporaries! But on two separate occasions recently, that is exactly what I have been called! And one of those was a gig that I LOST because of it. A Fortune [Read more]
Try my latest (and favorite) assignment sheet for writing an Identity Poem!
May 22, 2017 – 3:21 pm
Click here to download an assignment sheet I recently created using the popular and always entertaining Mad Lib format. I’ve been toying around for years with ideas for getting students to write something that then gets used in a completely different way in the final product simply as a way of jumpstarting their creative process. [Read more]
Now that April is over, I am cutting out caffeine!
May 1, 2017 – 3:28 pm
For the month of May, I intend to forgo coffee and tea and anything else with caffeine in it, and today is the first day, and I feel miserable. The last time I did this, it was the third day that was the worst so I’m getting ready for that. Why do it? Consider it [Read more]
“April is the cruelest month . . . “
April 26, 2017 – 7:36 am
I suspect this opening line to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was in some part responsible for April being designated National Poetry Month, but I don’t know for sure and don’t feel like Googling it right now. Regardless, it’s fine. April is fine. March is my birthday month (late March, too, the 28th) so when [Read more]