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 known by what is oldest in yourself; know the darkness and inhuman nullity at the core of your being is none other than 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. Death is so lovely
2. Insomnia
3. Sad To See Them All Go Down
4. Untamed Limits of Vision
5. Icarus
6. Love’s Runes Cast, Flesh Entrapped
7. King Lear’s Mad Song
8. Dead Kings, Dead Dreams
9. The Mighty Dead
10. Asmodeus Dreams
11. The Ventriloquist’s Art
12. The Dummy
13. Chasing Devils In Our Wine
14. Tattoo Apocalypse
15. Shadows & Light
16. Flight
17. Drifts
18. Darkness
19. Wisdom Chaser
20. Night’s Carnival
21. The Vicious Circle
22. The Red Stain
23. Oedipal Bastards Like Us
24. The Blooms That Will Not Rise
25. Before the Plague
26. Blind
27. House of Love and Curses
28. Lies Never End
29. In the absence of love…
30. Bone Turned Stone
31. Old Man in the Dark
32. The Hoodoo Man
33. A Dry Leaf in a Windy Land
34. Paw Paw
35. Countries of the Moon
36. She Sang Me Into Light
37. Death is not a Word
38. “Duende” – After Lorca
39. Honky Tonk Dreamer
40. Reckless Nights and Days
41. Postmodern Ennui
42. The Mask of Death
43. Troubling the Waters
44. The Taming of the Minotaur
45. A Death Song for Her Child
46. Doubt The Butcher Came Today
47. Old Men Sing The Delta Blues: Two Songs
48. Scorpion Thoughts
49. The Blue Devil in a Time Machine
50. The Black Prince (Satire)
51. Night Visitants
52. Hawks & Love
53. “My duende, come for me!”
54.  Land of the Free
55.  A Shore History of Insanity
56. The Philosopher of one Leg
57. Bodies & Languages
58.  Night Duty
59.  The Democratic Ghost Machine
60. The Last Troubadour
61. The Logics of Worlds
62. Outside Utopia
63.  Exit
64. If My Skin Were Blue
65. Graffiti Love
66. Let The Dead Speak
67. On First Seeing Courbet’s ‘L’Origine Du Monde Blonde’
68. I Turn Away To Shadows
69. Even As Night Comes
70. The Lost Cause
71. Where Have All The Maker’s Gone
72. Subtraction
73. The Suicide
74. Love’s Lost Kingdom
75. A Curse or Blessing?
76. The Betrayal of the Ephemeral
77. 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