by phillipw | May 4, 2022 | AE, BE, ES, HE, JU, LI, MA, PH
Junge Männer, a Sonnet Sequence on the photographs in Herbert List’s Junge Männer [Each sonnet is about at least one of the sonnets in List’s book. Before the title of each sonnet is the number of the photograph the poem is about, as in (#1). Often (or...
by phillipw | Jan 28, 2022 | HA, LI, LO
Looking for His Love The first firefly! It was off, away,— The wind left in my hand. ~ Issa The firefly lands by chance upon my hand And flashes there, blink, blink in twilight green. In growing darkness little glows expand,...
by phillipw | Sep 9, 2021 | LI
Meditation and Revelation A firefly, glowing, glowing, glowing swerves Around the temple bell and rests upon It, glinting. In the twilight glowing curves Have settled on the metal briefly. Drawn Towards the contours of the bronze, the fly Begins its...
by phillipw | Jun 22, 2021 | LI
The Endless Loop Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem Each blossom pushes towards perfection, pink Or white or orange. Petals open wide Like little gods that in their waking wink Towards a soft...
by phillipw | Jun 1, 2021 | FI, LI, LO, MA, SE
The Y Chromosome Inside the Tiny Holy Grail All day the firefly Folds in his glow beneath grass Waiting for twilight. ~ a found haiku; original words adjusted by PhillipWhidden; encountered in Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord...
by phillipw | May 30, 2021 | LI, PO, RE
Ricocheting and Reverberations “A Poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge The lazy ones all say, “I like this line.” That keeps them from admitting that they don’t Like all the others. That is all just...
by phillipw | Mar 24, 2021 | AN, LI, PO, TE
Textually Abused It used to be that English teachers taught Us poetry by reading it aloud Or telling us that on our own we ought To memorize it. In the distant cloud Of eons past all poetry was set In memory by bards but maybe no One else. Our teachers...
by phillipw | Mar 22, 2021 | GO, IN, LI, ME, PO
Four Corners Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The Earth was said to have four corners when The Bible first appeared in Jewish minds. My mind has just four corners. Its amen Is...
by phillipw | Mar 6, 2021 | DE, FR, JA, JU, LI, MA, NE, PS
Art for Farts’ Sake The monstrous lack of any sense in art Was followed by the monstrous lack of sense In thinking and philosophy . The part Of Derrida and Deconstruction’s dense Offensive springs to mind. A crazed theory Of this and that philosopher in turn...
by phillipw | Dec 29, 2020 | HA, LI, LO, Mc, ME
Linda He falls apart. He picks it up and goes To pieces. Snapshots there had lain inside The closet darkness decades. In the throes Of stirred up memories, he learned they misguide. Blank absence makes us think that we’re like ones Who don’t believe...
by phillipw | Dec 27, 2020 | KA, LI, NA, RE, VE
Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima The past is nuclear, exploding in A present moment boring as a brown Field waiting for some turnip seeds. The skin Of now is guiltless, threatless till the frown Of yesterday’s wide sins rips up the fleece. The grimace is electric in...
by phillipw | Dec 6, 2020 | FI, LI
Comprising Even the darkness is light to Him. (Psalm 139:11) The starlight pierces river darkness, black. The distant beams come down reflected in The moving surface, each a laser track Upon the water. Like a black hole’s skin, The flow envelopes it...
by phillipw | Nov 27, 2020 | AL, CA, LA, LI, MY, SA, ST
Lost Legends Long Before the Vedas and the Iliad Go far enough in time and all becomes Strict mists and stone. Fire circles heard the tales So long forgotten now that tribal drums Are recent evolutions, compared. Trails Do not exist to take us back to spells And...
by phillipw | Oct 11, 2020 | BO, CR, HI, IN, LI, MO, PO, TE, WR
A History of Upswelling Poisons Unintended Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem e plants some seeds, some sentences and words In rows. What might become of clauses, verbs, And paragraphs he cannot know. ...
by phillipw | Oct 5, 2020 | AL, GO, JE, JU, LI, ZE
Lightning Gods Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The lightning rods for timelessness, we wait For sly eternity to strike. We wait in time Yet immortality aims to castrate Or drown us. ...
by phillipw | Aug 25, 2020 | LI
The Humility of Lichen The little things we never think of, such As lichen on black rocks in forests we Have never seen—New Zealand stones—a Dutch Man wearing wide-legged woollen trousers he Pulled on that morning with his jacket for His uniform, or white, white,...
by phillipw | Aug 4, 2020 | BE, EA, LI, MU, OR, PH, PO, SO, Uncategorized
Initiations “Every word was once a poem” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, “The Poet” “A single letter was a matter of life and death.” ~ Anne Michaels The alphabets came late, like virgins to A wedding feast. The clauses, words, and grunts Of love were...
by phillipw | Jul 27, 2020 | KA, LI, MA, NU, RE, TR, VI, ZO
Some readers may find this piece offensive. If you think you might be offended, please do not read it. “Both in the Heavens and on Earth, Visible and Invisible” ~ Colossians 1:16 Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem...
by phillipw | Jul 20, 2020 | AN, BU, FA, IL, LI, OB, SA
Where Cleanest Vaulting Beauty Flies Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem “Youths and maidens all blythe and full of glee, carried the luscious fruit in plaited baskets; and with them there went a boy who...
by phillipw | Jul 17, 2020 | LI, PL, SO, XA
The Ion, the Phaedrus, the Republic When someone else is all mixed up, we tend To sneer at what they have to say, so why Not Plato? Must we allow him to bend And contradict his arguments? Is high Philosophy supposed to work like that? He has the voices in two...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | AP, DI, GO, LI, ME, MU, PO, RH
The Cavern Leading to the Muses When Linus first invented rhythm with A melody in song, the beauty came Ideal — so lovely that a sacred myth Could not compete. Apollo could not tame A thing so perfect, so he had to kill The poet. Deity must never lose With humans,...
by phillipw | Jul 12, 2020 | BE, EY, LI, PI, TH
Pindar on Theoxenus The poet Pindar focuses on love Derived from burning rays from flashing eyes Of young Theoxenus. They are above All others. Love in any other guise Is dimness at its best. The sun can melt The wax of bees, can sting it with its heat....
by phillipw | Jul 7, 2020 | AN, ET, LI, MO
Esthetic Wistfulness as Obscenity “The two greatest poems of western man are still, in many eyes, the two oldest. And the grace and sanity of Greece are not so common in the modern world that we can afford to forget them.” ~ F. L. Lucas in Greek Poetry Does ancient...
by phillipw | Jul 3, 2020 | LI, PL, TH
But What if I, when Speaking in my Own Voice, Make a False Representation of Myself? Elementary, My Dear Plato It seems that Plato means that if I speak Or write in poetry, but in my own Persona and my voice, that is not weak And dodgy like mimesis. In this clone Of...
by phillipw | Jun 11, 2020 | AL, ES, GI, LI, SE
Gin as Tonic It moves like hypnotism down the throat, Like fuzzy ecstasies that stroke the tongue Along their way. A beauty soon begins to bloat The brain like sugared peace and mist among The nagging weights, those boring days, the nights Of brownish...
by phillipw | May 27, 2020 | BO, CH, EA, EN, FI, GA, HU, LI, PA, RO
Earl Grey in Old Imari Porcelain He could have stayed behind his desk. He could Have signed stock-trading bonds. He could have stayed Not writing symphonies. Each night he would Have travelled home to comfort. Hubert strayed. He could have travelled home each...
by phillipw | May 22, 2020 | DE, LI, MO
What Matters Really is Only the Text Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem [This is a poem that is as fouled up as modern literary theory. The poem fails to be a sonnet.] What matters really is only THE...
by phillipw | May 17, 2020 | DE, LI, LO, LU, SE
The Cosmos Reduced to Pathetic Nil The cosmos, poor old thing, just falls away. It doesn’t matter anymore than dishrags, sour Beneath the sink. Creation starts to sway To less than nothingness the way a tower Crumbles into heap and dust in earthquake Nausea. Love...
by phillipw | May 15, 2020 | IN, LI, PO
Literary Inspiration from on High “The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about.” ~ King Alcinous in the Odyssey at the end of Book VIII The question of our poets’ impulse, long Ago...
by phillipw | May 10, 2020 | LI, RE
Reader Response Literary Theory “Chaucer doesn’t intend that his Pilgrims’ judgments be on the mark; quite the contrary, in most cases. They constantly overpraise and underpraise one another, miss the point, get the moral wrong, pursue unrelated quarrels, introduce...
by phillipw | Apr 27, 2020 | AE, BE, ES, LI, PL, PO
Plato Pooh-poohs Poets, like Blaming a Leopard for not Being an Antelope Poor Plato misses, glaringly, the point, As eggheads often do. Poets, he “thinks,” Are worse than useless. That’s due to their joint Mistake of using mimesis (which stinks)...
by phillipw | Apr 19, 2020 | FI, LI
Entirety A hand receives a firefly on its palm And holds wings for as long as they will stay. The moment is a time for twilight, calm, A luminescent quietness, dark and day, To meld together, briefly, briefly. Brief The instant, instant, instant but the...
by phillipw | Mar 27, 2020 | LI
Counterintelligence A text becomes a pretext for a nerd Of criticism, theorizing, or Detectives’ brains. The poem is a turd For lab investigation. Those minds pore Between the lines. These Sherlocks search for clues About the author or the context in His...
by phillipw | Mar 22, 2020 | LI
Life The random tints of blue are set beside Some richer colors. Here and there the cold One settles in a patch, like failure cried There. It enhances chord-like yellow, bold, And orange bursts. There’s too much beige and green As usual and not...
by phillipw | Mar 22, 2020 | DE, LI, PO
Éminences Grises The lines go on and on, so distant that They seem much farther from their readership Than Beacon Hill is from Medicine Hat. Such writing comes about through leadership Of theoretic minds as cool as crabs In Arctic zones. A Wallace Stevens,...
by phillipw | Mar 21, 2020 | DO, LI, TR
A Man Convinced against His Will Will Keep the Same Opinion—Its Worth, Nil I have a friend who wanted Trump to be Elected coz he was more fun than all The other fools on stage with Donald. He Was “far more entertaining.” (Small Considerations like obscenity In...
by phillipw | Feb 18, 2020 | FR, LI
Alert Discovering Americas inside Himself he never knew were there, he felt Apollo’s ranging thrust, Paul Bunyan’s stride Across their western deserts’ sagebrush pelt, Stepped out Atlantics and Pacifics, Lake Superiors, stretched canyons wider...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | LI, RI, VE
Rimbaud, Magyars, and the Perfect Number Seven Research reveals that when the Magyars Invaded Hungary, they counted up Not quite to seven. And in Verlaine’s stars Barely anything mattered but the cup Arthur offered him to drink. Verlaine should Undoubtedly have...
by phillipw | Dec 30, 2019 | LI
Stone Town Markers, Markets Bronze Livingstone is specked with pigeon shit And thousands walk across his abbey tomb His London grave, tourists, heedless of it. A few might think of liberty’s slow bloom In Africa where slavery died its long And lingering death. They...
by phillipw | Nov 26, 2019 | LI
This poem is a bit of juvenilia written when I was 19. It is not a sonnet. It breaks at least two major rules of the sonnet form, but then Wordsworth broke them spectacularly in “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” (which is almost...
by phillipw | Nov 17, 2019 | JU, LI
A Spiritual Reading: I Corinthians 13 What merit does this image have? Why print It in between two strangely moving ones? There is a bit of beauty here, a hint Of dreaminess as well, yet nothing stuns Us. Light and shade and texture form the whole Here. Nothing...
by phillipw | Nov 17, 2019 | DE, LI
Dreary Literary Theory There’s nothing quite so clear that scholars can’t Transmogrify it to opacity. There’s nothing academics won’t enchant Away to mud with their audacity. They do this with their stupid fancy words And jargon they deploy to make them seem More...
by phillipw | Sep 24, 2019 | HE, LI
Young and Doomed Why have a nightmare when, already, you Are caught in one? He lies alone in bed, Itself sufficient bad dream stuff to skew This scene away from others here. His head Especially looks threatened with his black Hair trapped in dead dark shadow,...