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...
