Poetry & Appreciations

From the beginning, if there was a beginning, this degenerate little town has become ever more degenerate… —Thomas Ligotti

In this sense the creation and catastrophe were one and the same. Our universe has been from the beginning, if indeed there was a beginning, one long journey into degeneration; an entropic swerve toward death, which if all signs are correct is accelerating us into oblivion and the scattering of dust in eternal night. This little section of my grotesquerie invites you to share the poetry of this darkness, to become one with the intimate erotic and scabrous art of ecstatic horror; come to know – if indeed knowing is the correct term, and be know by what is oldest in yourself; know the darkness and inhuman nullity at the core of your being is none other that the essence of this estrangement from the monstrosity of the universe of decay and rampant process; an endless voyage of disquieting abjectness that fills you with the graceless grace of terror’s beatitude.

Poems of the Darkness 

1. Untamed Limits of Vision
2. Icarus
3. Love’s Runes Cast, Flesh Entrapped
4. King Lear’s Mad Song
5. Dead Kings, Dead Dreams
6. The Mighty Dead
7. Asmodeus Dreams
8. The Ventriloquist’s Art
9. The Dummy
10. Chasing Devils In Our Wine
11. Tattoo Apocalypse
12. Shadows & Light
13. Flight
14. Drifts
15. Darkness
16. Wisdom Chaser
17. Night’s Carnival
18. The Vicious Circle
19. The Red Stain
20. Oedipal Bastards Like Us
21. The Blooms That Will Not Rise
22. Before the Plague
23. Blind
24. House of Love and Curses
25. Lies Never End
26. In the absence of love…
27. Bone Turned Stone
28. Old Man in the Dark
29. The Hoodoo Man
30. A Dry Leaf in a Windy Land
31. Paw Paw
32. Countries of the Moon
33. She Sang Me Into Light
34. Death is not a Word
35. “Duende” – After Lorca
36. Honky Tonk Dreamer
37. Reckless Nights and Days
38. Postmodern Ennui
39. The Mask of Death
40. Troubling the Waters
41. The Taming of the Minotaur
42. A Death Song for Her Child
43. Doubt The Butcher Came Today
44. Old Men Sing The Delta Blues: Two Songs
45. Scorpion Thoughts
46. The Blue Devil in a Time Machine
47. The Black Prince (Satire)
48. Night Visitants
49. Hawks & Love
50. “My duende, come for me!”
51.  Land of the Free
52.  A Shore History of Insanity
53. The Philosopher of one Leg
54. Bodies & Languages
55.  Night Duty
56.  The Democratic Ghost Machine
57. The Last Troubadour
58. The Logics of Worlds
59. Outside Utopia
60.  Exit
61. If My Skin Were Blue
62. Graffiti Love
63. Let The Dead Speak
64. On First Seeing Courbet’s ‘L’Origine Du Monde Blonde’
65. I Turn Away To Shadows
66. Even As Night Comes
67. The Lost Cause
68. Where Have All The Maker’s Gone
69. Subtraction
70. The Suicide
71. Love’s Lost Kingdom
72. A Curse or Blessing?
73. The Betrayal of the Ephemeral
74. Goodbye

 Essays & Appreciations

• Richard Hugo (1923 -1982) Poet of the Northwest
• K. A. Brace: Lucretian Poet of Mind and Eye
• Dark Earth: Poetry of Dean J. Baker
• Bri Bruce: The Pulse of Nature and of Love
• Pablo Neruda: The Poetry of Earth, Bells and Desolation
• Robinson Jeffers: The Poet Of Inhumanism
• Walt Whitman, Democracy, and the New Poetry
• The Art of Reading Well: Poetry as an Art & Craft
• Wisdom’s Lover: The Philosopher and the Poet
• The Mastery of Poetic Forms: Poetry Old and New
• Singing School: The Fine Art of Poetry and Hard Work
• The Poetry of the 21st Century
• The Lies Poetry Tells: Rhetoric, Poetics, and Tradition
• Poetry, Information, and the Triggering Town: K.A. Bryce and the Making of Poetry
• The Belated Poet and the Burdens of Tradition
• The Inhuman Turn: Poetry, Philosophy and Time
• Native American Short Story: “Our Dance” ePublished & eReady
• 21st Century Baroque Poetry: Excess, Invention, and Ornament
• Songlines, Cultural Memory, and Poetry
• Lauren Berlant: The Subtle Art of Cruel Optimism
• We the dead…. thoughts on Nicola Masciandaro’s A Note on Cosmic Pessimism

 Thoughts on Poetry

• On the Inevitability of Poetry (8/15/2014)
• Memory & Voice (8/16/2014)
• Priority, Authority and Poetic Wisdom (8/17/2014)
• The Comedy of the Streets (8/18/2014)
• There Are No Rules (8/19/2014)
• Initiation, Feelings & the Mysteries of Poetry (8/20/2014)
• John Clare ~ Horizon & Natural Fact (8/21/2014)
• The Poetry of Democracy (8/22/2014)
• Listening, Accents, Rhythm (8/23/2014)
• The Quest for Meaning (8/24/2014)
• Form is the Engine of Creativity (8/25/2014)
• Poetry as Labyrinth & Glass Bead Game (8/26/2014)
• Aristotle’s Poetics & Plot (8/28/2014)
• Figuration & Allegory: On the Symbolic (8/30/2014)
• A Poetics of Sense & Concepts (8/31/2014)
• Robert Graves, Ted Hughes & Poetic Mythography of the Goddess (9/1/2014)
• Robert Frost ~ Self, Poetry & Voice (9/2/2014)
• Autumn & Metamorphosis (9/3/2014)
• Goddess, Women, Poetry & the Secular World  (9/4/2014)
• Dark Ecology: Epic, Elegy, and the Ecological Poem
• The Movement of the World: Children, Dreams & Possibility
• Emerson, Neuroscience, & The Book of Nature – On Fate & Freedom
• Eros & Memory: Noir, Poetry, and the Past

Poetic Thought of the Day

•  Robert Frost ~ Self, Poetry & Voice
• On the Inevitability of Poetry
• Robert Graves, Ted Hughes & Poetic Mythography of the Goddess
• A Poetics of Sense & Concepts
• Figuration & Allegory: On the Symbolic
• Aristotle’s Poetics & Plot
• Poetry as Labyrinth & Glass Bead Game
• Form is the Engine of Creativity
• Listening, Accents, Rhythm
• The Poetry of Democracy
• The Quest for Meaning
• John Clare ~ Horizon & Natural Fact
• Initiation, Feelings & the Mysteries of Poetry
• There Are No Rules
• The Comedy of the Streets
• Priority, Authority and Poetic Wisdom
• Memory & Voice