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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
Oct 29, 20222 min read

Just a Friendly Reminder to Get Your Behind to ASUMH on Wednesday, November 2 at Noon


Hey there, everybody! I am just reminding all of you that my colleague in the ASUMH English department and fellow author Annie England Noblin and I will be signing copies of our respective books in the Gaston Lobby of Roller Hall on the Arkansas State University-Mountain Home campus on Wednesday, November 2 from noon to one. Who knows? We might do a little reading from the books. I will have books available for sale, and I can only assume Annie will as well, but she has not told me so.

If you don't need a book or don't need one signed, come on up and see our beautiful campus anyhow. The maples are in full fall foliage color, and our campus is gorgeous year round anyway. I'll even take you on a tour of our campus including our Ozark Regional Arts Council showroom, our marble art collection, our Rembrandt collection, and whatever else you might like to see.

By the way, don't let the title of my book scare you. "Atheists" is a word that means people who do not believe in the supernatural or a higher power. There are a lot of them out there, but my book does not discuss "atheism" as positive or negative anymore than it praises or condemns empty spaces. These things are what they are. The book does suggest that contemporary connections that are so focused on the extreme shallowness of social media and political identity may have awakened the atheistic tendencies in all of us and that we may have forgotten how to connect to those things that once filled us with awe, but it does not make accusations or wild claims. My poems tend to let readers decide what they think they know. You will find this idea laid out pretty carefully in the foreword.

I hope to see everyone who reads this at the book signing. Please share this with others who may be interested.

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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