by phillipw | Jul 1, 2020 | AN, DE, DI, FU, PO
Centuries before Sappho Praised Men and Women Pre-echoes of that verse, ancient Greek In poetry, go back so far that lost Verbs, Indo-European ones, can almost squeak Through Sappho. It is like they are embossed Behind the papyrus and her inked lines Were...
by phillipw | Nov 1, 2019 | CO, ID, MA, PO
Ideals Are More Equal Ideals take over like a virus in Some minds. Disease of thought requires the pills Of fact-based rationality. The sin Of thinking based on higher thought makes ills In cultures and philosophy. The French Left wing refused to dally with the...
by phillipw | Oct 18, 2019 | PO, PO
On the Literature Shelves A poem rests upon the page. That rest Is calmer than the calmest man. The lines Have no desire. They are not like a chest With nipples, hair, or heartbeat that defines Hard ribcage yearnings. Poems do not want A reader or his...
by phillipw | Oct 11, 2019 | PO, PO
Poetry, the Encyclopedia: Hesiod, St. Luke and St. Paul About eight hundred years before the first Of Christian poetry (Magnificat And Paul on Charity) there came a burst Of hatred from a crofter in a spat Hesiod? About his brother, verses filled with bile For...
by phillipw | Sep 26, 2019 | LO, PO, RI, VE
Even? “A relationship between two poets of the same sex, even if there is a physical basis, may provide an intensive intellectual companionship and stimulation.” ~ Wallace Fowlie, 1946 When poetry explodes in friction from Deep similarities, expect the best And...
by phillipw | Sep 26, 2019 | BE, PA, PO, VE
A Wan Jesus Levitating on His Cross “a poet of melancholy and shadows, of a fragile and intensely personal Catholicism, and of the springtime of love” ~ Edmund White on Paul Verlaine Petite the pieces and emotions, shades And tones—the minor mode prevailing—verse For...
by phillipw | Sep 24, 2019 | PH, PL, PO
Corydon and Pastorell: The Poets Paint their Pictures of Unsmelly Shepherds Daydreaming on Perfect Hillsides of Unsmelly Shepherdesses and Tending Unsmelly Sheep Your lies are what we do not want, he said To poets. Plato said imitation Of real things ain’t enough...
by phillipw | May 30, 2019 | PO
Seldom Pure and Never Simple: Fawlty Thoughts There’s freedom in the speaking of the truth. I know we’re not supposed to think that such A thing exists. It’s fashionably uncouth, Post-Modernism says, to use the crutch Of common sense. Too many minds have come With far...
by phillipw | Feb 21, 2019 | PO, Uncategorized
“Early poetry finds its stories and then finds ways of remembering them.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 8 “Helen Hunt Jackson once commissioned Emily Dickinson to write her a poem about an oriole . . . Dickinson responded with ‘The Hummingbird’.” ~...
by phillipw | Oct 3, 2018 | P, PO
Poetry is Not the Lever and Fulcrum of Archimedes “The full-flowering Scottish tradition of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas was defeated when Scotland was defeated.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The Story of Poetry War changes poetry. Old English verse Had reached an apogee of...