ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

poetry

  • ESSENTIAL POETS

    I have been thinking about essential poets. Poets that I feel must be read. Or better yet, that I must re-read. So I made for myself a quick list of essential poets (in no particular order): Reviewing the list now, I see a number of holes (Victorians, contemporary), but overall I think I am satisfied with it. Read more

  • Poems in my Pocket

    Years ago I worked in a middle-school Media Center. Each year, the English teachers would declare a day as, “Poem in Your Pocket Day.” On that day staff and students were encouraged to carry around in their pockets, a favorite poem to share others. It began for me a habit of always having some of Read more

  • Poetry Review: “The Poet and the Bird” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a great influence on Emily Dickinson. Not, of course, in language or style but more in temperament. Certainly the wordiness of Barret Browning bears little in common with the spareness of a typical Dickinson poem. It is easy to see why Dickinson would have gravitated to Barret Browning. Her playfulness of Read more

  • Friday’s Food For Thought: Auden on Poetry

    [Those who complain about the ambiguity or obscurity of modern poetry] “should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.” ~ W. H. Auden Read more

  • On Writing

    For close to 30 years, I have had a habit of writing, editing, and rewriting just about everyday: poetry, journaling, fiction, and blogging. I go through phases where I will send some of it out to contests or for publication. Occasionally I have had someone choose to publish something I have written. These are featured Read more

  • On Re-writing Poems

    Years ago I remember reading that Yeats would constantly re-write and re-work even his most famous published poems. At the time I read that, it sounded like the most insane thing I had ever heard. Why go to all the work to make a poem, to get it right, have it set into type and Read more