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Emily Dickinson’s example permits all “Nobodies” to believe in their own work in spite of the world’s neglect. And I say, bless her for that.
Poetry is a manifestation of the human urge to make sense of chaos, to find unity and symmetry in external reality.
Can you recall ever giving a poetry reading that might have gone better, or might better not have happened at all? It happens to all of us. Even marquee poets can remember the reading where no one came.
If poetry is a matter of sounds, then sound must be the basic unit of form. Putting it another way, what do assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, rhythm – all of the tools in the toolbox used for constructing form in poetry – have in common? All of them, in their different ways, create recognizable patterns […]
If the history of Western literature were compressed into a single day, Homer would declaim the opening lines of The Iliad on the stroke of midnight; Dante would climb out of Hell at 6 pm; Chaucer would ride for Canterbury at 7; Shakespeare and Milton would follow them across life’s stage two hours after that. These and […]
On a snowy January day, years ago, I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange a Christmas gift. As I sorted through the mess on my desk (the clutter in my study having reached Mephistophelian proportions), there was a thought in the front of my mind, that I had seen the slip […]
Speech is as natural to human kind as breathing. We inhale, and speech becomes potential, becomes a possible outcome. We exhale. The charge of air, mined of its oxygen, enters an Aeolian wind tunnel. The throat unseals and partakes. Sounding over the harp of the vocal cords, modified by tongue and teeth and lips, the […]
3. Verse, I have come to think, is poetry written in pursuit of limited objectives: to entertain us with a joke or tall tale, to give us the inherent pleasures of meter and rhyme. It is not great art, nor is it trying to be. Verse, as Orwell says, tells us something we already know […]
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Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is of the few published collections of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.