Song of a Reformed Headhunter

My poem "I Am My Names" appears in  Zócalo Public Square , with an expressive black-and-white photo by Paolo Aquino. The poetry editor Colette Labouff asked me to submit after getting my name from Jonathan Farmer. With this pub, and the later appearance of "A Lover's Recourse" in At Length , only one out of the seven sequences in my next book remains unpublished. I guess a book should give something unavailable elsewhere, besides bringing together in an organized whole an entire conception. * Watched Puccini's Turandot last Saturday night. The seats in Lincoln Center Plaza were almost all gone an hour before the screening. Found a place in the third row, where the view was not bad at all. Simple story stretched out to operatic length. Princess Turandot requires her suitors to answer her three riddles or be beheaded. The young prince Calàf answers the riddles but gives her a chance by asking her to find out his name. She tortures his slave girl Liù to g...

Last night, GH and I watched the bohemians live it up in their garret, in the opera loosely based on  Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger. I thought the plot was a little wonky in the middle, and then learned from Wikipedia that Puccini decided not to put to music a missing scene by the librettists. Rodolfo the poet fell in love with Mimi the seamstress, but she died in the end of sickness. Rodolfo's comrade Marcello, a painter, was in love with Musetta, a singer, but she wanted independence and wealth, both of which Marcello could not give her. She turned out to possess a heart of gold when she helped the dying Mimi return to Rodolfo's garret, and bought the dying woman the hand muffs she had always wanted. The plot was even more sentimental than what one would expect of opera. It lacked the philosophical sweetness of Der Rosenkavalier and the psychological complexity of Les contes d'Hoffman . I don't have the program with me, and I cannot remember the na...