Well on the 50th anniversary of M*A*S*H I am unearthing my historic cover of Suicide is Painless.
These pages left blank
Unintentionally
Someone always meant to fill them
The dog’s water bowl is empty
A word of encouragement via the miracle of international cell coverage to the partner
Signature required, faucet cylinder arrived, I can’t give it
It was a gift someone gave themself
Time not included
For Tudum, the Netflix-run website that allows viewers to go deep on their favorite shows, I wrote this opinion piece about the horrors of intimate partner abuse — and the ways in which the media was complicit in assigning guilt to Sarma Melngailis long before she’d been convicted of anything.
My latest Vanity Fair article on Sarma Melngailis, the “Bad Vegan.”
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Danyelle. A Corona Poem by Allen Salkin. Read more about this project: allensalkin.com/poems.
Danyelle. A Corona Poem by Allen Salkin. Read more about this project: allensalkin.com/poems. This is the original handwritten draft.
Hi, I’m writing one poem a day, each for a different person in my life. I’m calling these “Corona Poems.”
The word “Corona” has many definitions, one referring to halos around the sun and moon. Another is “the glow around a conductor at high potential.” Also: “a part of the body resembling or likened to a crown;” “the cup-shaped or trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the center of a daffodil or narcissus flower;” and, a web search shows, “a circular chandelier in a church.”
Generally, corona refers to something good, something enlightening — even in better times the Mexican beer in the beautiful clear bottles.
I am scared of the creeping disease that is keeping us indoors. I have asthma and don’t want to test my body against the virus. But these poems are not about sickness. They are an outgrowth of the turning inwards that this moment has created.
I’m a writer who has generally made my living in journalism. But I started out writing poetry and bits of memoir and have been meaning for a long time to get back to that and to the novel that’s been percolating on my desk for nearly two decades.
Now is the time to tend to this inner glow.
I am composing each poem using a fountain pen dipped in ink, written on beautiful thick paper in a large blank journal my mother gave me as a college graduation gift. I’ve been waiting for decades for the right time to use this journal. There may be cross-outs and imperfections in my scrawled handwriting, and final edits only in the clean “typed” version.
Each poem will be sent directly to the subject and posted on my website allensalkin.com If you prefer your poem not be posted online, I will remove it. You are free to share your poem.
I am also available to write a custom poem for a person you would like to honor with one. I am starting out charging $100 for these, and I will email the poem and later follow up by snail-mailing you the handwritten poem. Write to me and I will you send a brief questionnaire about that person to provide me with details I’ll need.
I am starting this on March 24, 2020.
Sincerely,
Allen
Here is my casting page if you’d like to engage me as an actor. My “type” is probably a writer, slightly eccentric (curly-haired) professor or skeptical news reporter – maybe tempestuous chef, scheming scientist or mad criminal. But here you will see a range of looks – including deranged camper and office nerd. Headshots by Theo Juliet. For commercial work I am represented by Aqua Talent.
There are other forms of masculinity other than toxic masculinity. I filed this from Sundance 2020 where no film I saw had landed on a new positive version of a male romantic lead.
