I wish
I missed you
After all those years
and all of that
That my only thought.
How sad is that?
Summer grass, a poem
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lackadaisical
When folks living from the late 17th to the late 19th century had one of those days when nothing goes right, they could cry "Lackaday!" to express their sorrow and disappointment as a shortened form of the expression "alack the day." (Alack is an interjection used to express sorrow or regret.) By the mid-1700s, the adjective lackadaisical had been formed to describe such weary and exasperated folks, as well as their half-hearted doings and sayings.
A Tragedy
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is usually
remembered only as the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, but Doyle himself
believed that his historical romances were his most important work. He felt
that detective stories were part of ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement,’
and he aspired to be a ‘serious’ writer; in writing historical romances, he
believed he was following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott.” Kenneth Wilson,
A Tragedy
Who’s that walking on the moorland?
Who’s that moving on the hill?
They are passing ’mid the bracken,
But the shadows grow and blacken
And I cannot see them clearly on the hill.
Who’s that calling on the moorland?
Who’s that crying on the hill?
Was it bird or was it human,
Was it child, or man, or woman,
Who was calling so sadly on the hill?
Who’s that running on the moorland?
Who’s that flying on the hill?
He is there—and there again,
But you cannot see him plain,
For the shadow lies so darkly on the hill.
What’s that lying in the heather?
What’s that lurking on the hill?
My horse will go no nearer,
And I cannot see it clearer,
But there’s something that is lying on the hill.
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Ireland. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry. This poem, “No Second Troy” was written in about 1912 and studies the complexities of love and societal conflict through a series of questions. Composed in twelve lines of iambic pentameter, the poem reflects Yeats’s personal feelings towards Maud Gonne, a woman he loved deeply but who ultimately rejected him. He grapples with the impact of her actions on his life, suggesting that her inability to find a suitable role in society leads to both personal and social turmoil. By comparing Gonne to Helen of Troy, Yeats draws on classical mythology to explore themes of beauty, violence, and the constraints of their contemporary Irish culture.”
No Second Troy
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
Playwrights
The Bite Sized Theatrical Spooktacular 2026
We are looking for original short plays (or other theatrical pieces) that are 10 minutes or less.
This production is on Halloween, and we encourage any submissions that may resonate thematically, whether they directly relate to Halloween or not.
While we will consider anything and everything, we especially want to see submissions that are comedic or spooky, as this fits best with the tone of the evening!
***
Wicked Cat Productions is seeking short plays for a new evening of work exploring kink, fetish, and/or desire
We are looking for plays that are bold, curious, theatrical, and respectful of the communities they engage with. The hope is to build an evening that surprises the audience, subverts expectations, and treats desire as something complex, funny, strange, tender, powerful, awkward, joyful, dangerous, sacred, unserious, deeply serious, or all of the above.
***
The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers supports projects that draw on the research collections of The New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the Humanities and Social Sciences Library). The Center seeks top-quality writing from academics as well as from creative writers and independent scholars. Visual artists whose projects require extensive use of Library collections are also encouraged to apply. Visit www.nypl.org/research-collections for detailed information about the collections of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** TALKING ABOUT MIME ***
The San Francisco Mime Troupe eventually gave birth to the Diggers, a community action group that Mr. Coyote helped found, which offered free food, clothes and medical care to the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury scene.
Bill Graham, who became a powerhouse rock promoter, began his career as the troupe’s business manager, organizing benefits that featured acid-rock royalty like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Mr. Davis had studied in Paris under Étienne Decroux, who was one of Marcel Marceau’s key teachers and was known as the father of modern French mime — or “meem,” as Mr. Davis called it, observing the French pronunciation. But under Mr. Davis, the San Francisco troupe veered from tradition early on; it freely used dialogue and blended the avant-garde theatricality of Bertolt Brecht with the provocateur sensibility of Lenny Bruce.
The result was a sharply political form of commedia dell’arte, the centuries-old Italian theatrical form known for its masks, broad comedic stylings and earthy humor.
More...
https://archive.ph/hOsUh
***
Deburau is credited as the father of mime but down the years the genre has been sustained by a long line of chalk-faced Frenchman. On Deburau’s death, actor Paul Legrand succeeded him as the new Pierrot at Théâtre des Funambules, giving the character the more tearful, sentimental dimension we still see in many mime acts today. Ever faithful to the winning white face paint, Legrand did away with his predecessor’s bulky outfit and often chose to perform in his ordinary clothes (beret and breton stripe anyone?). Then, in the 20th century, French theatrical practitioners like Jacques Lecoq and Étienne Decroux were central in developing mime as a formal artistic genre. Both writers published detailed theoretical explorations of the subject.
Last but not least, perhaps the most well-known French mime artist in recent years was Marcel Marceau, whose performances of his persona, "Bip the Clown" achieved international acclaim. Marceau even put his mime act to heroically good use, while working for the French Resistance during the Second World War. Performing silently as Bip, the mime kept groups of Jewish children quiet for hours as they escaped across the border from occupied France into Switzerland.
More...
https://www.theatreinparis.com/blog/a-history-of-mime-the-most-oh-so-french-of-art-forms
***
Mimes are sometimes hated in fiction. No real reason is ever given, but the Uncanny Valley may have something to do with it - after all, their pure white faces and refusal to speak give them a definite alien aura. This trope isn't limited to people who hate mimes, but also works of fiction that seem to have it out for them. In other words a character doesn't have to say "I hate mimes" for it to be this trope. All the character needs to do is fall on, punch, kick, or otherwise cause intentional or accidental harm to a mime. A variation of this is Everyone Hates Morris Dancers, without a reason for it ever being given.
More...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryoneHatesMimes
***
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to another in our Brief But Spectacular series, where we ask people to describe their passions.
Tonight, we hear from artist and performer Bill Bowers, who teaches mime, a theatrical technique that uses gestures, instead of words. He's at New York University.
BILL BOWERS, Mime: I am from a big, quiet family in Montana. I was an incredibly shy younger person.
I am also a gay man, which the word gay didn't even exist back then, but I knew about silence early on for all of those reasons. I got older and learned that there was an art form about not talking. I thought, oh, my God, that's perfect. I'm in.
I loved mime once I learned more about it. When I had a chance to put my focus on being a mime performer, I really went in that direction.
A story came on the news that Marcel Marceau was embarking on his 80th birthday world tour. And I thought, I have got to study with Marcel Marceau. I sought him out. I was intimidated by him. He was a very famous, very old French mime. And all of that came into the room with him.
He talked about himself in the third person a lot. He said: "People say Marceau is genius. I say, no, Marceau is not the genius. Genius is where Marceau and the people meet."
More...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/214131/bill-bowers
***
“Seriously, I don’t think you see the potential for hilarity here, and, you know, miming is one of the first things actors have to learn —”
“Do you not hear what I’m saying? We’re not doing mimes,” David snapped in a tone reminiscent of my mother when she’d finally had it “up to here” with her four daughters pestering her to add more impulse items to the shopping cart. “I. Hate. Mimes. There will not be mimes on our show. Ever. So don’t bring it up again.”
Terri and I simultaneously pulled back our heads and widened our eyes at each other, which is the universal body language for What is that guy’s deal?
We’d been brainstorming subjects for our friend and creative cohort to feature in her “Terri Tries It” segment that appears on the art-centric TV show that I produce and David directs. So far, Terri had tried everything from ballet to glass-blowing. David was often skeptical at first — he required convincing and thought-out planning before he’d even begin to consider a subject. But he had never before displayed this much contempt for any one idea.
“I don’t like mimes, you know,” I said. “I don’t find them funny at all, but I don’t hate them. What is it about them that you hate so much?”
“Hate’s a strong word. It would probably be more accurate to say that —”
“Fine, forget about hate, that’s not the point.” I fought off an argh, took a deep breath, and continued, “Why do you strongly dislike mimes? Is it because they’re like clowns? I mean, I hate clowns. Like, I really hate them. They freak me out.” I imagined David must have had some terrifying childhood mime encounter.
My coulrophobia (fear of clowns, it’s a thing) began when, at a young age, I saw the movie Poltergeist, in which a clown doll tries to kill a boy. As if the nightmares featuring that creepy killing toy clown weren’t traumatizing enough, I also watched Stephen King’s miniseries It, in which Tim Curry plays an evil monster clown with sharpened teeth. Killer Clowns from Outer Space sealed the deal.
More...
https://divabarbarella.com/read-weep/diary-of-a-diva/i-hate-mimes/
***
Étienne Decroux, the father of corporeal mime, developed a grammar of movement meant to internalize all of human drama within the body’s edges. For the head alone, he stipulated two hundred and fifty positions. He parsed a further one hundred and eight of the head’s inclinations to demonstrate yet a wider range of emotions, though he later realized even this was insufficient. And perhaps because I am not a mime student, mastering this sounds to me like a banausic prospect. There’s also little that’s natural in codified movements, though I suppose that’s the art of it. Otherwise, we would all be mimes by virtue of moving while keeping quiet.
Though if there is a grammar at work, then miming is a language, meaning mimes are far from silent. The mime is an artist, and artists cannot keep from clamoring for notice. Mimes chatter on while trying to make their faces disappear into a whiteness, trying to speak for all of us. Overlaying their skin with clown makeup to express universal emotion, whiting out their features so that we might more easily identify with the theatrical drama, so that we might perceive the mimes as our simulacra. As if we are just as loquacious, our own emotions just as stripped of color. As if because we fail to understand the grammar of movement and never studied mime in Paris, our bodies cannot form their own sentences.
More...
https://acrossthemargin.com/grammar-of-mime/
***
Marcel Marceau discusses the art of mime ; part 1
Marcel Marceau, world renown mine, discusses the art and history of pantomime. Marceau talks about mime throughout history from Ancient Rome to the 20th century. He discusses some well-known mimes such as Pierrot and Charlie Chaplin. From aging, to humor and tragedy, and different cultures, Marceau explores about how the art of mime affects and reflects society. They also discuss how Marceau created and plays Bip and how the audience interacts with his character.
https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/marcel-marceau-discusses-art-mime-part-1
--Marcel Marceau discusses the art of mime ; part 1
Marcel Marceau, world renown mine, discusses the art and history of pantomime. Marceau talks about mime throughout history from Ancient Rome to the 20th century. He discusses some well-known mimes such as Pierrot and Charlie Chaplin. From aging, to humor and tragedy, and different cultures, Marceau explores about how the art of mime affects and reflects society. They also discuss how Marceau created and plays Bip and how the audience interacts with his character.
https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/marcel-marceau-discusses-art-mime-part-1
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Sonnet by Archibald MacLeish
O too dull brain, O unperceiving
nerves
That cannot sense what so torments
my soul,
But like torn trees, when deep
Novembers roll
Tragic with mighty winds and
vaulting curves
Of sorrowful vast sound, and light
that swerves
In blown and tossing eddies, branch
and bole
Shudder and gesture with a
grotesque dole,
A grief that misconceives the grief
it serves,
O too dull brain,—with some more
subtle sense
I know you here within the
lightless room
Reaching your hand to me, and my
faint eyes
See only darkness and the night’s
expanse,
And horribly, within the listening
gloom,
My voice comes back, still eager
with surprise.
Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Sonnet”
was collected in The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company,
1924). About MacLeish’s poetic work, Grover Smith, a noted scholar of T. S.
Eliot and professor emeritus at Duke University, wrote in his biography
Archibald MacLeish, “Between 1917 and 1924 MacLeish’s style acquired the
features of its maturity—conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical
strategies of argument; composed and intense implications—all of these owing
much, though quite certainly not everything, to Eliot’s example. [...]
MacLeish’s poetry, for the most part, is not introspective, and this is why
indeed no persona is wanted. According to its own purposes, its diminution of
the persona is a strength: by this means it turns the reader away from the
endless labyrinths of subjective illusion and irony, the ‘echoing vault’ of the
poetic self, and invites him to contemplate the phenomenal world. It does not
vocalize that self: it can and often does fabricate a kind of disembodied speech,
or speech whose origin need not be known.”
Archibald MacLeish, born in
Glencoe, Illinois, on May 7, 1892, was a writer, Modernist poet, and lawyer. He
authored several books, including his epic poem Conquistador (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1932) which won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He served as a Chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets from 1946 to 1949. MacLeish died on April 20,
1982, in Boston.
After My First Breakup, My Father Writes His First Email
“I was sifting through an email
account that’s over twenty years old to make space in its storage. I found this
email that my dad wrote for the first time in his life, after I got my heart
broken. I was moved, and heartbroken again, imagining him typing this up in
[South] Korea, away from his family; seeing that I never replied; realizing
that I had forgotten all about this email. I wrote this poem to belatedly
acknowledge and fill my gaps in memory with these moments of tenderness, in
which he was often clumsy but was nevertheless at his sincerest.”
—Emily Jungmin Yoon
After My First Breakup, My Father
Writes His First Email
Emily Jungmin Yoon
With his two index fingers—“the
eagle method,”
as one says in Korea—he broaches
everything else:
the recent death of a Korean
actress, lessons
from the life of a sportswear brand
chairman.
Then, a turn: I don’t like to use
the word “love.”
It never feels complete.
Away from him, me in my new
country, everyone
and everything is in love: I love
your shoes, I love your hair, this,
that, him, her.
When had my father and I said the
word
to each other?
How many times had I, picking up
his call,
ended it in a rush, bored, running
to declare love to my boyfriend?
My teenage passions, precious;
my father’s loneliness, not my
responsibility.
My “wild goose father,” flying back
and forth
to see a closed room, only
petulance left
at the door, as I preened privately
for nonexistent boys.
How easy it was to forget this
man’s sensitivity,
his love for music, that he took
saxophone lessons,
coming home to an unlit apartment.
A taciturn man, who sings alone.
Who, when years later asked
what instrument he likes listening
to the most,
said, the human voice.
Copyright © 2026 by Emily Jungmin
Yoon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2026, by the Academy of
American Poets.
Spring and Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkins
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
“Spring and Fall” was collected in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems (Humphrey Milford, 1918). For the podcast Close Readings, poet Maya C. Popa was in conversation with Kamran Javadizadeh, an associate professor of English at Villanova University. In her analysis of “Spring and Fall,” Popa said, “In reality the tree is going nowhere, it’s still alive, it’s dormant, it’s a season, it’s not leaving. And on the other hand she’s [Margaret] the one who’s going to leave.… That tree existed before her and that tree will exist when she’s gone. In some ways, these are the spiritual exercises of nature, they are continuous. And we have our ‘seasons,’ too, but we feel in much more emotionally taxing ways about our seasons than nature seems to feel. Nature does not seem to worry about its ebbs and flows, and we are in a constant state of neurosis about death.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844. Known for his innovations in prosody, most notably his “sprung rhythm,” the vast majority of his work was published posthumously. He died on June 8, 1889, in Dublin.
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