Poets

Why. Poem. Sonnet. David J Delaney.

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New morning sun brings forth her warming rays

while dying leaves drift gently to the ground.

Approaching winter soon will dampen days,

when ice will hang from barren trees abound.

Korea’s changing beauty I have seen,

penned every scene for all the world to read.

I miss so much your sparkling eyes of green,

while for your love, my heart again will bleed.

 

The freezing snow will cover all that lives

I hope I will survive this daily fight.

A priest once said that Jesus Christ forgives,

though what I do, he could not see as right.

My helmet sits upon my weary head ─

My rifle, now replaces pencil lead.

***

For my Uncle, Lawrence George Delaney, 1st Battalion RAR, who served in Korea.

***

Here is a short bio for you:

Now in my late 50’s I left school at 15 years old. Only 3 months after “making” grade 8 has been in many ways a drawback involving my literary goals as I only starting “writing” in late December 2007 and has been a huge learning curb for me, I am still tackling how verbs, adjectives, nouns, syllables, etc, work.

As a award winning poet, and recently a memoir/short story writer, I have had wonderful support, in Cairns , Queensland , Australia and worldwide. My love for writing and the impact it has on everyday people, has, definitely been an inspiration to continue with something I honestly enjoy, and, if I inspire one person to write and or showcase their work, then I have done my job. 

David J Delaney
Internationally published Australian Poet.

 

 

 

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Pimp Shoes. Poem. Sonnet. Phillip Fried.

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Did I mean to stalk the streets in cothurni? Shit, no.
I just failed to foresee the precarious vaudeville wobble
as the head with its chorus surveys what’s unsteady below,
its kibitzing voices tsk-tsking a double hobble

(another fine mess chalked up to clueless hubris),
hands groping for balance but looking as if I would break
into patter-song: oh hamartia, convivial riff.
And a fool might truly say, he’s a dupe of the Fate

that dogs the consumer, scammed with apotheosis
and the heady allure of a glowing ocher toe cap.
But watch me teeter in glory, a pimp Oedipus,
eyes level with second-floor shops for Pedi-Mani.

Elevation was my downfall, catastrophe
my rise. And my marrow’s red honey—fear, pity.

 

 

“Pimp Shoes” by Philip Fried was published in Cohort [Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2009.

 

Philip Fried (1945― ), earned a B.A. in English at Antioch College, an M.F.A. in Poetry at the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. On writing sonnets, he has this to say, “I draw inspiration from the sonnet’s origins to update it for the Digital Age. Linked from its earliest days to legal proceedings and a modern psychology of conflicted love, the sonnet held together what wanted to fly apart. I have re-conceived the contemporary sonnet as an arena where fragments of self and samples of lingo play off against one another.” His poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, New Orleans Review, Partisan Review, Paris Review and Tin House. The most recent of his five published books of poetry is Early/Late: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2011), which was called “skillful and memorable” by Publishers Weekly.

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

 

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. Selected sonnets are pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

 

 

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‘A Busy City…’ Poem. Scott Hastie.

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A busy city,

Far from home.

 

 

Onrushing,

The teeming crowd,

A tsunami of sorts.

 

And as you walk on into the melee,

As it comes to you,

For the briefest, sweetest of moments

To catch the eye,

To share a smile,

To touch the soul of a stranger

You may never see again.

 

This is as it should be.

 

The often cavernously empty

Business of life will always

Occasionally be overwhelmed by truth.

For the restless soul hungers for such moorings,

Such absolute points of recognition

Gifted by love,

By light shared with others.

 

But such chances come and go so suddenly

That what was once so recent, so vivid

Already seems so distant and long ago.

 

What then,

If not still true to your heart?

 

Only swamped I fear.

Lost on a surging tide,

Swept back to faceless oblivion,

To the ruin of indifference to start again…

 

© Scott Hastie 2012. All rights reserved.

 

 I am a full-time writer and poet, based in the UK– fortunate enough to be living and working in tranquil surroundings of the English countryside, some twenty miles north of London.

 My poetry looks to positively explore human potential, with an emphasis on love, spiritual growth and self awareness. It is very important to me that my work remains as open, accessible and as simply expressed as possible. My influences vary from the great traditional English visionary romantics through to the distillation of thought and leanness of expression offered by the Japanese haiku tradition and later technical breakthroughs achieved by leading Scottish concrete poets, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan.

 

Sparkling new poems & images at www.scotthastie.com

***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com
 

 

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Still Life. Poem. Sonnet. Annie Finch

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vermeer Girl with an Earing

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring

A sunny afternoon, think of Vermeer.

Here is the apple, here the rounding side

of the blue pitcher. On the scrubbed wood just here,

she puts the pitcher down, so that the slide

of drops against its lip catches what light

there is for pitchers here this afternoon.

She does not really see the drops, or quite

attend the blue. A common thing. But soon

the tide will turn, and salty smells will rise

to circle in the street, and to her ears

will come the voices. Then doorways to her eyes,

then other days than this afternoon’s years.

She will stop to hold this moment near,

and drop the pitcher, and betray Vermeer.

***

Annie Finch is a highly acclaimed, widely published, and extremely gifted American sonneteer, whose complete biography and literary career are to be found by searching “Wikipedia Annie Finch”. Her inimitable sonnet, “Still Life”, which we republish here, has previously appeared countless times in poetry anthologies and books, journals in print and E-zines. Annie Finch is also a highly reputed poetry and sonnet critic.

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. Selected sonnets are pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 ***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

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VI.Sonnet.Poem.Barbara Crooker

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300px-Jan_Vermeer_-_Girl_Reading_a_Letter_at_an_Open_Window

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Reading_a_Letter_at_an_Open_Window

 

One word, and then another, falls in line

like geese wedging their way down the sky,

a vast scroll of paper yet unwritten. I

Roll a sheet in the typewriter, and begin

again, to try and pin down what’s elusive,

some insistent bird that whistles from a bush,

“Here, here, here I am,” then vanishes,

while I am left to struggle with the narrative.

Like “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”,

I wish the light would flood in from the left,

paint me slickly gold, tell me what comes next.

But I am in the dark, no map, no text,

just following my heart as night falls soft,

covers us with her obsidian wing.

 

“VI” by Barbara Crooker. “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”. The reference is to the painting of the same title by Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). See also “Still Life”, by Annie Finch.

 

Barbara Crooker’s sonnets have appeared in magazines such as The Schuylkill Valley Journal, riverrun, Poets On: and Fringe. Largely a free verse writer, she believes that sonnets are another tool in the writer’s paintbox. Her work has been widely anthologized, in places like Poetry: an Introduction (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and Good Poems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor,Viking Penguin). Her book, Radiance, was winner of the 2005 Word Press First Book Award, and Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Her forthcoming book Gold. Barbara Crooker appears (2013 or 2014) in the Poeima Poetry Series of Cascade Books, a division of Wipf & Stock. Website: www.barbaracrooker.com

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

 

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. Selected sonnets are pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 ***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

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Schindler’s List.Poem. Sonnet. Corey Harvard

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Schindler’s List *

“ for the dead and the living, we must bear witness. ”

 ― Elie Wiesel

 

I see the aching words of Elie Wiesel

born in black and white: the metal eyes

of Nazi Germany on Israel,

the numbered numberless, the animalized

who once were men — whose children will not know

the innocence of childhood again —

and still, the falling ash, the burning snow,

the deep, remorseless appetite of sin.

 And there am I, entirely, one of them,

lost in the heavy silence of the room

without the power to conquer or condemn

the tyranny, the terror, or their doom.

Too many think of hell and live in fear

of death, and never know that hell was here.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List

Corey Harvard (1987 ― ) from Mobile, Alabama, (B.A. English & Philosophy, University of South Alabama, 2012), is a young American musician, pianist, vocalist and poet. He began writing verse at age 10 and music at age 12 when his parents bought him a keyboard. He went on to win his 8th grade talent show by performing an original song. Since then, he has published poetry and prose in journals including Tales of the Talisman, Pirene’s Fountain and Sense Magazine, and he has also been featured in Alabama’s prestigious Literary Mobile, an anthology of established (historical and contemporary) southern writers. He has served as associate editor of Sonnetto Poesia and Editor-in-Chief of Oracle Fine Arts Review. In 2009, he was a Pushcart Prize nominee.

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. Selected sonnets are pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

 

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Again, Kneeling Before Anubis, Lazarus Wept (New Refrain).Poem. Joseph Armstead

by

Lazarus

… Truth is a mansion, a many buttressed cathedral,
Notre Dame de Despair au Île de la Nuit, a gothic sprawl
of unending night where the light from a single dim candle
burns, beckoning, but the blind faithful do not see,
no one comes …

Armored in its solitude, it is a sanctuary built on screams.

i) Godforsaken and Estranged

At sunset, will the rain stop falling?

There are shadows dancing across the freeway,
ghosts of Promises Past, reminders
of All the Things We Could Have Been,
both evolution and mutation,
both supposition and deduction,
no answers,
racing to and from the recesses of memory,
leaping the gaps between ganglia,
tracing tortured neuropathways,
and as they slide grayly over the racing bodies
of personal destiny, they dissolve these seeds
of the future, leaving only quicksilvered ash
on the road haunting the edges
of the map of the soul.

A soiled and dirty penny lost
in the dark folds of a trouser pocket,
Fate drizzles across the pitted pavement
falling from clouds stained
by disillusionment,
the disenchanted deprivation
sends lightning down a dead spine.

Cold water puddles shallowly…

ii) Anno Corporealis: The Bondage of Flesh, Cold and Dark

The Dreamer, staggering under his load of Sins, awakens… 

Frightened, yet triumphant,
the broken marionette dares to rise,
legs shaking, atrophied musculature straining,
sightless eyes locked
onto the face of the Godhead,
the inscrutable divinity laughing
in a whispery croak,
and
the imprisoning cloak of flesh
enveloping the Dreamer
splits and cracks,
unable to completely contain
so much promise at last galvanized
into trembling, unsteady motion —
the Road to Utopia
and the Road to Ruin
converge —
the Divine Source vomits forth
a Promise of Eternity,
a shop-worn brand of immortality,
sold at discount prices.

Sunset finally settles over the rainswept cathedral,
a sanctuary, where each prayer ends in a scream.

http://redroom.com/member/joseph-armstead

http://www.amazon.com/Condemned-Of-Heaven-Joseph-Armstead/dp/0578013665
anubis

***

BIO
 
Joseph Armstead is a suspense-thriller and horror author living in the United States’ San Francisco Bay Area.   Author of a dozen short stories and ten novels, his poetry has been published in a wide range of online journals, webzines and print magazines.   A mathematician, Futurist and computer technologist, Mr. Armstead’s poetry often defies easy description, but frequently includes neo-classical imagery, surrealist viewpoints and post-modern themes.

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

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The House of the Idiot. Poem.Sonnet. R.W.Haynes .

by

 

Dosteyoevsky

 

 

 When Dostoyevsky seemed so pessimistic,

 I smiled to think he’d viewed society

as though the false, the foolish, and the sadistic

established the patterns of human propriety,

with demons hovering over each decision,

winking and leering, clouding calculation

with appetite, with decency in derision,

annihilating honesty in negotiation.

Wondering at his marvellous naïveté,

I recognize that diabolic brood,

and ask myself how he could write all day

depicting evil with exactitude.

Age brings these recognitions, it seems,

as nightmares shove aside our foolish dreams.

 

 

 

R. W. Haynes (1951 — ), Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published sonnets and other poems in numerous journals, including Ampersand Poetry Review, Lucayos, Off the Coast, The Queen City Review, The Resurrectionist, Lucid Rhythms, Kritya, Willows Wept Review, Sixers Review, Sonnetto Poesia and Tertulia. He teaches early British literature and Shakespeare, with occasional courses on Ibsen and on Horton Foote.

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. Selected sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.

http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 ***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

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