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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Aug 8, 20212 min read

A Few Words About The Purple and Blue Collection of Poems

Answering questions some before they are asked.


I tend to agree with the author, poet, or critic (probably Yeats or Wilde) who said that there are attempts at poetry and then there is poetry and the two are very different things. One attempts to draw a perfect circle or draws a perfect circle. The ends are not the same. One ascends to the peak of the mountain or stops somewhere short and does not reach the peak. The result is not the same. There is no “good” or “bad” poetry. There are attempts at poetry, and sometimes, the result becomes poetry.

The Purple and Blue Collection of Poems is a compilation of my attempts to draw the metaphorical perfect circle or my abbreviated ascension of the symbolic poetic mountain, whichever image you like best. I find some poetic lines within a few of these attempted poems. The greatest value of these efforts--for me--is that I have rewritten or reworked nearly every poem in this book at some point in my life. The ideas in these verses have fundamental philosophical qualities that have stuck with me as I have grown, learned, and changed. The craftsmanship—well, I’m little embarrassed by how sloppy I was willing to be.

The Purple and Blue Collection of Poems is a collection of poems typed and saved from handwritten copies in old spiral notebooks. I think the earliest one is from 1982. It is the best of the thousands of attempted poems that I had scribbled in the notebooks. A year or two ago, a co-worker named Laurie Thomas (RIP, Laurie) helped me convert all of the materials that I had typed from those notebooks from a floppy disk, (Yes, really!) to a flashdrive. I had a plan to publish the rest of those efforts back in 2000. I am glad I didn’t. They serve me now as fuel as I have become a poet, like Yeats in his older years, who has to sift through his trash to discover the inspirations he forgot.

The Purple and Blue Collection of Poems is still available through all online booksellers as far as I know. I also have a few—maybe five or six—copies myself. I also have some bookmarks that I could share with you if you would like some email me your address or figure some way we can get together. If I give you a book, share it, or loan it, you have to promise me that you will read it and share your ideas and thoughts with me.




Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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