Category Archives: Poetry (What is it?)



Failure

Despite his Nobel Prize, Faulkner explained
That writers always fail. They cannot move
The aura that illuminates the brain
Into alphabetic squiggles that prove
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Posted in Beauty, Inspiration, Poetry (What is it?), Wisdom

Form, Dammit, Form!

I often chide the poets of our time
For being narcissistic to a fault
For being formless and eschewing rhyme
Abandoning the strictures we exalt.
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Posted in Inspiration, Poetry (What is it?), Vanity

Literary Prose

Famously, Bill Howells and Henry James
Wrote to each other about the travails
Novelists endure while pursuing fame
And fortune. Their complaint? Incessant wails
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Posted in Inspiration, Poetry (What is it?)

Poetry

Why and who, I wonder, wrote that first poem?
It was hard enough to move from gesture
To grunts, howls, inventing the lyric thrums
Of myriad language—words, rich and pure!
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Posted in Beauty, Poetry (What is it?)

Winter Rant

Solstice, equinox,
Nature’s holy-days
Carve seasons into our blemished world.

December twenty-first
And my mortgage—
A poem a week—
Remains unpaid.
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Posted in Beauty, Greed, Poetry (What is it?), Seasons

My Volume Of Verse

I’ve hammered out
Three hundred ninety poems,
Some bent and skewed,
Some polished
And quite bright.
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Posted in Greed, Illusion, Poetry (What is it?), Politics, Religion, War, Wisdom