This is my Father’s favorite poem, and he read it out loud to my Sister and I many times on cold Virginia Winter nights. It is a visionary and beautiful work, full of transcendental images, longing and mystery that Frost’s conveys quite beautifully and simply. This poem and the wonderful illustrations of this book (along with "The Pasture” by Frost ( Read more... )

I bought Next to Nothing by Paul Bowles at a local bookshop back in 1992 and it has been beside me since then. The poems are visionary and eternal but also haunted by an existential ghost that has spooked much of modern philsophical thought for the last 150 years or so. The poetry is also beautifully imagistic and suggestive and this (short but ( Read more... )

"The perennial Hawthornian antagonism between sickly desire and imperious guilt is critical in (his stories)", notes Fredrick Crews in the introduction to The Great Short Works of Hawthorne. We need to consider Hawthorne's peers, the predominant literary modes of thought included Emersonian transcendentalism, which established a direct link between ( Read more... )

I thought of “The Poet’s Year” by J.W. Goethe once again, I read this small tract of writing while in Graduate school in a collection titled “Masterpieces of The World’s Best Literature” published in 1910. I beliveve that it helped to shape my writing process as a Poet as much as “Letters To A Young Poet” by Rilke or Jim Morrison’s essay on the ( Read more... )

I found an anthology of poetry by Edgar Allen Poe back in 1990 from the Laurel Poetry Series that was an important book for me, and it eventually revealed to me the magnitude of what kind of Poet Poe truly was and his life as well. Charles Baudelaire was a translator of Poe later in the 19th century and held him in the highest regard. Poe should be ( Read more... )

My first encounter with Robert Frost was my Father's reading of Stopping By A Woods on A Snowy Evening to our family and it was my first experience with poetry. The poem has a mystical quality and convey's the eternal well (even to wide eyed children before Christmas). I always felt that Frost was responsible for connecting poetry and the people ( Read more... )

I just came across a photo of Robert Bly on his farm in
2009 and thought about how important his poetry has been
to me over the years and his teaching as well. I was given an anthology
Bly had Edited and a video back around 1990-92 or so. The book was titled
"The Rag & Bone Shop of The Heart" and I recently purchased the hardback
version of it ( Read more... )