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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

There’s a Light, Over at the Poemshape Blog


Anyway, I found a new poetry bestie who does not even know that he is my go-to read when I feel like I need support for my particular brands and tastes in things poetic. He is a blogger, poet, and overall wise poetic fellow by the name of Patrick Gillespie, and his site has over 3 million views. I don’t guess that I have ever noticed how long the blog has been around, and I am not going to look now because it does not matter. I don’t know how appropriate it is to mention other bloggers or to post their website in my blog without exclusive permission, but here is his site: https://poemshape.wordpress.com/about/

I really appreciate his blog because his story is very similar to mine, and we share very similar views about the current state of poetry in America and in the world. That viewpoint is as positive as one can be about the piles and piles of free verse non-poetry that poetry fans are subjected to daily by inept editors and publishers who have never written (and maybe have never read or published) a good poem. Gillespie has written poetry since a teenager, and some of his stuff that I have read is damned good, but he has only been published through self-publication like me. His initial influence was Robert Frost; mine was probably Theodor Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss, but Frost was a close second influence for me. Check out The Seven Hour Love Song in one of my books, and you will see that I am telling the truth. (By the way, I have done a total reworking of that poem in the new book.) Gillespie only has the one self-published book produced in 2000. I have three from like 2000-2002, but they could easily have been one. He is an excellent mimic of pretty much any style that he chooses to imitate just like me. Read The Craven in The Joy of Shadows if you don’t believe me. His poem Ulysses in Burlington, Vermont is an incredibly clever mock up of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses. Is Gillespie’s a great poem? I don’t know, but I recognized the excellent wit in it within the first few lines, and its cleverness is maintained throughout. I have read it twice, and remember what I said about going back to a potential poem?

I feel that I probably should note the one obvious difference between the two of us. He lives in Vermont, and I live in Arkansas. No, just kidding! --Though our worlds are much different, I would imagine. Mr. Gillespie is wise, witty, and erudite to the point of being bookish. I enjoy reading some of the gems that he comes up with in his droll New England humor. His line, “It would be better if poets were fed to the lions of public opinion. Drive them out of the universities, if not literally then figuratively. Drown institutional benevolence in a barrel of water,” is some of the most relevant poetry criticism that I have seen and read in many years. However, I sometimes feel, when reading his thoughts, that I am reading the papers of my peers in graduate school. Yes, there is a place for such pompous and intellectually irrelevant academic scholarship, but that place is in graduate school. Poetry and its criticism must be accessible to non-scholars if it is ever to retain or regain its importance to a general reading public, “fed to the lions of the public” as he says. That is a minor disagreement in our styles. I am not likely to butt heads with the intellectuals and academics that he does because he is a semi-famous blogger. I prefer a conversational, country-story infused style in my presentation though I really wouldn't mind butting some heads. I hope that my style is working. If it isn’t, would you tell me?

I am at my word count.

Patrick Gillespie’s blog is awesome. Check it out. I will give extra credit to anyone who can tell me where I got the title of this blog. Hint: It is from a very weird movie adapted from a play.

Today's picture is of some polk salat berries growing on bushes in my blackberry patch. I don't mean on the blackberry vines but on polk salat stalks.. Blow the picture up. It is pretty cool.

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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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