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. Bone Turned Stone
2. Old Man in the Dark
3. The Hoodoo Man
4. A Dry Leaf in a Windy Land
5. Countries of the Moon
6. Death is not a Word
7. “Duende” – After Lorca
8. Honky Tonk Dreamer
9. Midnight Carnival
10. Reckless Nights and Days
11. Postmodern Ennui
12. The Mask of Death
13. Troubling the Waters
14. The Taming of the Minotaur
15. A Death Song for Her Child
16. Doubt The Butcher Came Today
17. Old Men Sing The Delta Blues: Two Songs
18. Scorpion Thoughts
19. The Blue Devil in a Time Machine
20. The Black Prince (Satire)
21. Night Visitants
22. Hawks & Love
23. “My duende, come for me!”
24.  Land of the Free
25.  A Shore History of Insanity
26. The Philosopher of one Leg
27. Bodies & Languages
28.  Night Duty
29.  The Democratic Ghost Machine
30. The Last Troubadour
31. The Logics of Worlds
32. Outside Utopia
33.  Exit
34. If My Skin Were Blue
35. Graffiti Love
36. Let The Dead Speak
37. On First Seeing Courbet’s ‘L’Origine Du Monde Blonde’
38. I Turn Away To Shadows
39. Even As Night Comes
40. The Lost Cause
41. Where Have All The Maker’s Gone
42. Subtraction

 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