There’s Someone You Need to Meet
Culture Critic
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community” – Dorothy Day By ... Read more
Posts by: J.S. Porter
Dancing with Thomas Merton
Culture Critic
(Photo: Thomas Merton) for David Wagg I carry two lines of poetry in my head every place I go: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your ... Read more
First Reformed: An Unconventional Review of an Unconventional Movie
Culture Critic
for Susan McCaslin and Mark Haddock By J.S. Porter Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader has made a film worth your time. You may know him as the screenwriter of Taxi ... Read more
How to Read Harper’s Magazine May 2018 with the Retractable Tongue of a Snake
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
a prose poem for John Robert Colombo Read the way the snake moves, how it smells with its tongue, how it eats mice Glance, graze, ignore, skip, survey, wander in ... Read more
Books for the Planet
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
for Kaizen, Marshall, and Blake Every now and then something drops into your life and changes it, ever so slightly. My subscription to The Atlantic came to my mailbox today, the ... Read more
Titles (In Articles, Books, Movies, Stories, Songs etc.)
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
I CARE. Y DON’T U? That’s a better title than plain old “Titles,” isn’t it? I have your attention now, don’t I? Sometimes a title, or headline, is everything. It ... Read more
Black Panther
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
for Daniel J. Porter, M.Eng and Jesse R. Guscott, MD Africa. Birthplace of us all. Ancestral home of the African diaspora. The land of dreams and sometimes nightmares. Ancient giant ... Read more
Tribute to a Friend – Wayne Allan (1941-2018)
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
“There are people one meets in books or in life whom one does not merely observe, meet or know. A deep resonance of one’s entire being is immediately set up ... Read more
Hemingway’s Finca Vigía – The Lookout House
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
– By J.S. Porter; Photographs by Cheryl Porter For Daniel and Rachel Fourteen miles east of Havana is Hemingway’s Cuban home—Finca Vigía, “lookout house” – now Museo Hemingway. It’s located ... Read more
On The Shape of Water
Culture Critic, InRetro Magazine
A scene from ‘The Shape of Water’ – filmed in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario (HO-Fox Searchlight) – By J.S. Porter As in most fairy tales, whether ET or Beauty and ... Read more
I Love New York
Culture Critic, Poetry
for Rachel – By J.S. Porter I love New York. I love it because it’s a Big Minestrone Soup, everybody from everywhere, thrown into a Giant Pot, all simmering – ... Read more
Our Lady of the Veils
Culture Critic, Poetry
– By J.S. Porter A superhero has a particular skill— impervious to bullets, good with webs, etc.— a particular flaw, kryptonite, say. Veiled Lady’s gig is disguise; she veils. ... Read more
Emily Dickinson at War
Culture Critic, Poetry
– By J.S. Porter Gun fire When you read Emily Dickinson you enter a War Zone Sometimes the war is over ... Read more
Glenn Gould as a model of how to get your work done
Culture Critic, Poetry
…the fabulous terror of not knowing before/one begins. Again. Kate Braid, “The Goldberg Variations (1981)” in A Well-Mannered Storm – By J.S. Porter Start something big Like Bach’s Goldberg ... Read more
I Must be Saved: Listening to Madeleine Peyroux
Culture Critic, Poetry
Listening to Madeleine Peyroux’s “I must be saved” from Bare Bones for Rev. John Porter (1919-2003) my sun, my moon, my whole sky – By J.S. Porter Lose your ... Read more
A Sister Says Goodbye to a Brother
Culture Critic, Poetry
for Kate Van Viegen – By J.S. Porter When Anne Carson lost her brother, she wrote a book about him. Anne Carson, a Canadian poet, wrote a book called Nox ... Read more
The History of Poetry
Culture Critic, Poetry
for Rachel – By J.S. Porter I like my poetry pure and simple. Bug a boo, I love you. That’s my daughter talking to her soon- to- ... Read more
Why Read?
Culture Critic, PoetryI used to say: Read because
you get to know your shadow,
you see the world multi-dimensionally,
you understand the Other…
But these are pastoral reasons,
sheep-in-the-meadow reasons…
Un
Culture Critic, Poetry
According to David Crystal’s, ‘Think on my Words:’ Exploring Shakespeare’s Language, Shakespeare has a penchant for using Un in imaginative ways – 314 instances in the OED where he is ... Read more
Shakespeare’s Library
Culture Critic
– By J.S. Porter O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams. His nutshell ... Read more
A Note on Patti Smith
Culture Critic
– By J.S. Porter A rememberer of the familial dead and the artistic dead. Reader of Blake and Rimbaud, Bolaño and Murakami. Mourner (with humour). What else can ... Read more
Fake News
Culture Critic
– By J.S. Porter Is fake the keyword of our time? Fake presidents, fake marks, fake smiles, fake eyebrows, fake bank accounts, fake money, fake sympathy, fake trees, fake ... Read more
Gord Downie, Great Soul
Culture Critic
Photo by Chris Leboe. (his Lakota spirit name – “He who walks with the stars”) – By J.S. Porter saw him once, with a host of other notables. He sang ... Read more
Singing the Light
Culture Critic, Poetry
Singing the Light for Sarah Hall by j.s. porter The day’s soot on an obscenely tense face, an ill-fitting mask, the itchy and uncomfortable skin, what do you do with ... Read more
So Lightly Here
Culture Critic
Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016 so lightly here by j.s. porter we’re all lightly here, says the tao and the zen, says the bible, says Leonard Cohen in a song, we’re ... Read more
Hillary and the Donald: The Second Debate
Culture Critic
By J.S. Porter I’m naïve enough to believe that society will be changed by examination of ideas through books and the press, and that information can prove to be greater ... Read more
Donald J. Trump: Something’s happenin’ – The First Debate
Culture Critic“I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament. I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.” – Donald Trump
Read more
Portrait of a Potter – Frances Ward (plus Brancusi, a Japanese word & the Book of Jeremiah)
Culture Critic
Pottery is an old art form. As old as the Bible. You’ve heard the lines sometimes referred to a s “The Potter’s House and the Ruined Vessel” from Jeremiah 18: ... Read more
Orphan Black – Wow!
Culture Critic
Above: Cosima, played by Tatiana Maslany, ponders on who to trust in BBC’s Orphan Black. I’m a Johnny-come-lately to this sensational TV thriller by BBC America on the Space channel. ... Read more
Dennis Lee’s “Deeper” and National Poetry Month
Culture Critic, Poetry
Is poetry in your life? Should it be? What are you missing if it isn’t? Sometimes people get their poetry from Björk or Radiohead or Arcade Fire. Sometimes they don’t ... Read more