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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** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 ** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

On November 21, 2026, we will host the 8th Annual Faces of America Monologue Festival at The Marjorie S. Deane Theater in NYC.
Each year we celebrate the diverse stories that make up America by inviting writers to submit two minute monologues that showcase the broad spectrum of what it is to live, work and play in America. Our aim is to collect unique, captivating and beautiful stories and share them so that we learn, grow and hear each other.

***

South Street Players (southstreetplayers.org) is seeking original, short (10 mins preferred, 15 mins maximum) plays for its 16th Annual Tri-State Theatre Festival. The event will take place November 6-8, 2026 in Spring Lake, NJ.

***

2027 Lamoise New Works - MOXIE Theatre seeks plays by women:
- Four (4) ten-minute plays
- Two (2) full-length plays that will receive a workshop and undergo a short development process with the actors and creative teams.
- And one (1) full-length play that will be performed as-is, will be selected for a staged reading.
- All playwrights of full-length works will be provided travel and housing for the duration of the festival weekend (not including the workshop process).

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** OSKAR EUSTIS ***

Oskar Eustis has been running theaters his entire adult life.
He co-founded one, called Red Wing, when he was 17. He has led companies in Zurich (Das Labor), San Francisco (Eureka), Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum), and Providence (Trinity Rep). And, for the last 21 years, he has been the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, stewarding Free Shakespeare in the Park, nurturing “Hamilton” and becoming one of the most influential figures in the American theater.

Now, he says, he is ready to do something else. On Wednesday, he will announce that he plans to step down from his position at the Public on July 31, 2028, which is his 70th birthday. His departure will signal a transition — in what direction, no one can be sure — not only for the Public, but also for theater in New York, where Eustis is among the last of a group of long-serving artistic directors who for decades oversaw the city’s biggest nonprofits.

The Public, the birthplace of “A Chorus Line” and “Hair,” is one of the country’s most storied theaters. And it has a big footprint: the recently renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the six stages at the former Astor Library in Lower Manhattan, a spiffy new set of rehearsal studios and a mobile program that tours Shakespeare plays around the city.

More...
https://archive.ph/2CLH0#selection-4033.0-4049.185

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I graduated from high school early and then spent a year hitching around the country, hooking up with theater companies and festivals along the way. I’d arrive in a city, sleep in the park or find someone with a couch and eagerly participate in the festival. The work I tended to like was abstract — difficult, often impenetrable pieces whose formal complexity seemed to elevate the art to something more than the mundane. Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and the amazing Lee Breuer and JoAnne Akalaitis of Mabou Mines — these were the artists who inspired me most.

But in May 1975, I found myself at the second Invitational Festival of Experimental Theater in Ann Arbor, and I met the Living Theater.

The Living Theater, founded and run by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, was the legendary mother of us all. Founded in 1947 in New York as a European-style art theater, the Living (as it was known) soon morphed into one of the most politically radical and boldly adventurous theaters in American history. Its productions of “The Brig” and “The Connection” were landmarks, as were its Brecht productions. Since the early 1960s, its members had been living in Europe in tax exile, an anarchist collective as pure in its political passions as it was committed to its alternative lifestyle.

In Ann Arbor, the Living presented the first site-specific piece I had ever seen: “The Legacy of Cain.” It brought the audience on a procession through Ann Arbor, stopping at buildings, from the R.O.T.C. to the police station, which it saw as representative of the military-industrial complex. At each building, it led a ceremony, formal and almost religious, to reject the building and all it stood for. At the bank, the Living handed out Monopoly money to ceremoniously burn, representing our rejection of the commodity-driven financial culture of capitalism.

The audience burned the play money; I burned my real money, all of it. It was a foolish, even silly gesture — although I don’t remember how much, I’m sure I had to borrow from a friend just to get back to Minnesota. But I’d had an experience that would stay with me forever: The seed had been planted that my radical artistic impulses could be connected to my political engagement.

https://archive.ph/xBen8

***

Eustis talks about collaborating to find the right form, along the way articulating the reason that so many of America’s best writers, composers, and directors are lining up to work at the Public. “We’re taking artists we believe in and letting their visions become as individual as they are,” he says. “That’s the thing I’m proudest of about Fun Home. It isn’t trying to imitate any other show. It’s not trying to look like some commodity. The idea was, let it become itself. And if you do that well enough, that’s what people are going to respond to. And, you know, we’ve been on a pretty good streak recently.”

Indeed, under Eustis, the Public—which runs five theaters and a nightclub, Joe’s Pub (where Adele had her recent launch party), from its home in the former Astor Library, on Lafayette Street—has been shaking up the entire theatrical landscape. It followed the sleeper success of Fun Home with the explosion of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary hip-hop musical about the least-known Founding Father, which has become a once-in-a-generation cultural phenomenon and, since transferring to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, a monster hit. This month, those shows are joined by the Broadway transfer of Eclipsed, Danai Gurira’s searing play about the plight of women during the Second Liberian Civil War, featuring a superb ensemble cast led by Lupita Nyong’o. Showstopping lesbians, multiracial rapping immigrants, and West African sex slaves: This is not your parents’ Broadway.

Off-Broadway, too, has the Public’s influence written all over it. At Playwrights Horizons, the Zimbabwean-American Gurira (you may know her as The Walking Dead’s samurai sword–wielding Michonne) also has Familiar on the boards. And two playwrights from the Public’s Emerging Writers Group have new plays this season: Skeleton Crew, by Dominique Morisseau, just ended its run at the Atlantic Theater Company, and War, by the unstoppable Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon; Gloria), starts performances at Lincoln Center Theater in May. It’s no wonder that the Public has come to be considered the closest thing we have to a national theater. “The core idea behind the Public is democracy,” Eustis says. “Who gets to see the art and who gets to make the art—and how can we be a place where marginalized groups get to take center stage and validate their part in the larger story of America. And I think with both Fun Home and Hamilton you see that really succeeding. They’re both beautiful shows, but they’re also moving the needle on the culture in really interesting ways.”

More...
https://archive.ph/TIBNa#selection-735.0-861.141

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Why theater is essential to democracy | Oskar Eustis

Truth comes from the collision of different ideas, and theater plays an essential role in showing us that truth, says legendary artistic director Oskar Eustis. In this powerful talk, Eustis outlines his plan to reach (and listen to) people in places across the US where the theater, like many other institutions, has turned its back -- like the deindustrialized Rust Belt. "Our job is to try to hold up a vision to America that shows not only who all of us are individually, but that welds us back into the commonality that we need to be," Eustis says. "That's what the theater is supposed to do."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5foou7mIA0w&t=2s

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Oskar Eustis: Bringing “Hamilton” to the Stage and Making Theater Accessible to All
Oskar Eustis is the Artistic Director at the Public Theater in New York City. He sits down with Guy to talk about “falling into the avant-garde rat hole” early in his career; convincing Lin-Manuel Miranda that Hamilton was more than a concept album; bringing theater to senior centers, women’s shelters, and prisons; and why he believes performing arts are essential to democracy.

https://www.thegreatcreators.com/episodes/eustis

***

Eustis met Papp only once, in 1976, when he auditioned for a spear-carrying role in a production of “Henry V.” At the time, Eustis was enrolled in New York University’s experimental-theatre program, and, at eighteen, was already the co-director of his own experimental-theatre company, called Red Wing, which produced impenetrable performance pieces based on the works of Peter Handke and Heiner Müller. “Papp asked me to do some Shakespeare, and I said I didn’t know any,” Eustis told me. “I said I had this piece I’d been working on, based on a poem by Kenneth Koch, called ‘Sleeping with Women.’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you show me a bit of it?’ I did this twenty-minute performance piece, and by the end I had flop sweat—when you know it’s a disaster—running down my face. When I had finished, he said, ‘What was that?,’ and I said, ‘It was a poem called “Sleeping with Women,” ’ and he said, ‘I suggest you keep doing that.’ ”

The lack of a personal relationship with Papp, however, has permitted Eustis to develop a relationship with Papp’s legend. “He constantly pays tribute to the legacy,” Gail Merrifield Papp, Papp’s widow, says. “I know Oskar is inspired by some of the principles by which Joe operated. He is passionately devoted to free Shakespeare, and the democratic nature of the audience.” Papp’s rallying cry was “Shakespeare for All”—evidence of his genius for combining populism with public relations. (The neighborhood groundlings who watched Papp’s actors rehearsing in East River Park in 1956 could hardly have been persuaded to pay for a ticket.) Upon arriving at the Public, Eustis displayed a Pappian touch when he declared that all of the theatre’s tickets, not just those for shows at the Delacorte, should be free. This proposal has not yet made the transition from manifesto to policy, to the palpable relief of those of Eustis’s colleagues for whom logistics must loom larger than symbolism. “We have to figure out what ‘free’ means,” Andrew Hamingson, the Public’s executive director, told me, cautiously.

More...
https://archive.ph/TS42n

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We continue our Angels in America at 20 Years Video Series with a video interview with Oskar Eustis, the current Artistic Director of the Public Theater in New York City. Mr. Eustis commissioned Angels In America and served as the dramaturg on the show while at the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco, and was the co-director of the Los Angeles production of the show. He discusses how effective the characters of Angels In America are in representing the American Culture as a whole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuHwgwC3u48

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