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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

Who the Heck Is William Joy Bragi?



Okay, so it’s not always the first question that people ask when they discover that I have written and published books of poetry, but most people eventually get around to it: Who the heck is William Joy Bragi? Quite simply, he is a guy that I made up as an alter ego and a member of my Scriblerus Club who eventually became a character that pops up in my writing over and over again. Then, as a joke, I had him step into reality, steal the poems from my second book The Mercy Killing: The Death of Poetry, and publish them in his name. It turned out to be a joke on me because more people have made comments and review about his writing than mine.

As far as the character himself, “William” was chosen as his first name because the greatest writer in western literature had the first name William, so my alter ego companion had to have that name. “Joy” is more of the attitude that I had intended the character to have toward all things literary than it is a name although his personality has changed drastically as I have aged. He is a bit cynical now. Go figure. The name is also a bit of a tribute to my mother Joyce. Bragi is the Norse god of poetry whose name actually is skaldic for poet, I believe. I’ll have to check on that one. Anyway, that’s the story behind the name.

It is a bit odd that I actually have written an unpublished poem that is currently titled “When a Powerful Will Departed” in which I laid this character to rest. Now, as I am starting to get word out about my writing, the old and the new, he keeps popping up again and again. Here is the final section of that poem. I can share the rest with you if you are interested.




V.

Do not think I have changed my fickle mind

Because this art form seems to love you gone--

I will conceal the rhymes you leave behind

As though they are but dead words of my own.

On to eternity, Old Poet!

Take with you this seedy generation

Of egoistic dealers in bootless woe.

--No friends to men nor imagination

Are they—And right damned eager to show it!

That Will that you knew, I no longer know.


If you would like to know more about Will J just ask.


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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