“The Isle of Dogs” is a story in my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. In it, a group of scholars investigate the play of that name, by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, which was suppressed and is now lost. The French play mentioned here, Caquire, is also real, but its use in the story […]

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A rollicking fairy tale told with stringent poetic constraints! Here are the first six stanzas of thirty-three. BARON AARON The Baron Aaron, though of great nobility, Did not appear particularly noble. His face was red and round, his features mobile, His body squat and scot-free of agility. His intellect was frivolous and trivial; He wasn’t […]

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The Pope’s Mustard-Maker is now available from Black Scat Books! Translated by Doug Skinner! Le Moutardier du pape was the last work that Alfred Jarry finished, a few months before his death in 1907. It was one of many operettas he worked on in his last years, and one of the few he finished: a bawdy three-act […]

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I set this short poem by Ezra Pound when I was 19. The poem is one of Pound’s Provençal translations, from an anonymous troubadour; my setting favors fourths and fifths.

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