Art is created within contexts. These words provide a framework to discuss my first day of FringeNYC. The context isn’t always the most interesting part, but it is important. Over the past seventeen hours, I’ve spent about two hours walking in New York from one theatre to the next, three hours on trains to and from New York, four hours watching plays, and five hours sleeping,

Eternity in an Hour

The first play I attended was Eternity in an Hour. If I wanted to be snide I could say it only seemed like an eternity. When I moved to New York thirty years ago after dropping out of college, I arrived with hopes of making a living as a writer. The only living I’ve really made by my writing has been writing computer programs. Poetry, to me, is the queen of the literary arts, and William Blake was one of the masters. When my eldest daughters were young, I often read William Blake to them at bedtime.

Plays about poets have always had a special attraction to me, so I was excited to see this play. I’ve seen such plays about Wilfred Owens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., and various Scottish poets at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and I looked forward to what this play had to offer.