Poets

Today, Noon Traffic Crowding.Poem.Sonnet.E.M.Schorb.

by

 

 

 

Today, noon traffic crowding, heat appalling,

I saw the double of someone I knew.

A face from long ago, I heard it calling

as plain as I might now be hearing you.

 

Thank God I’m not a king, or Canon Law

would have me married to the woman yet!

Pathetic creature! Not the one I saw.

That woman looked like one I would forget.

 

I mustn’t be unkind! Resentment speaks.

So many years to hold a useless grudge!

Life’s like a faulty sink from which love leaks.

Would you believe I stopped and couldn’t budge?

 

-Forgive my grief, then, when I turn aside.

-I have at heart what I had thought had died.

 

 

E.M. Schorb (1935 ― ) began writing poetry when he was a teen and has never stopped. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the North Carolina Arts Council, along with grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Carnegie Fund, among others. His poetry has appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Chicago Review, The Deronda Review, The Formalist, Measure, Lucid Rhythms, The Lyric, The New Formalist, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review and many other publications. His collection, Time and Fevers, was a 2007 recipient of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing and also won the “Writer’s Digest” Award for Self-Published Books in Poetry. One collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Other work is listed and reviewed at: emschorb.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. 30 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/http://vallance22.hpage.com/

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editor@artvilla.com

 

 

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“Mendocino Moonlight” Poem. Sonnet.Stephen Morse(1945-2010)

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The waves of water suck the exposed land.

The ocean rocks non-stop midnight to noon ―

 low to high to low; rocks of salt and sand,

 some black, some white, a saturated boon

 of organic soups & pools; a small cat

 stalks hermit crabs in the surf. A donkey

 ― held by a man in a white straw hat ― sat

 too far away to be broken, honky

 white; dark, live ― labeled at the hollow door,

 noose wrapped in the fork of an old tree

 root starved in the sand; the edge of the poor

 creek filled by loose stubble moss shadows of me;

 -a wave falls fly-body green and foams white

 -in a cold moon Mendocino midnight.

 

Steven Morse (1945―2010), who studied at the University of Oregon, California State University (Hayward) and at San Francisco State University, was the publisher of the small print poetry journal, Juice. The Toronto Quarterly: Literary & Arts Journal (Jan. 30 2010) refers to him as “Stephen Morse: the Last American Beat Poet”. The author goes on to say:

 I fondly remember listening to him read his poetry on the Jane Crown blog radio show, sharing a few laughs and remembrances… passim… I remember how excited he was when I told him the news of an interview he’d done a while back with Louis Bourgeois and Zachary Bush would be published in The Toronto Quarterly … passim… He was deeply supportive of small print literary journals like mine, having run Juice with his wife Judy for years, he knew that world well and he often told me, “keep going and don’t listen to the critics, never give up, you’re doing great things, and we need journals like yours around.”

As Editor-in-Chief of this anthology, I deeply share such sentiments about Stephen, whom I always found extremely likeable, personable and approachable. I also find his sonnet, “Mendocino Moonlight”, one of the most remarkable in this anthology.

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 & Persia, 30 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/

***

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The Potato of Terror.Go Thrust.Poem.Sonnet.

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Go thrust thy buttocks through the window frame,

Thou always claimed the sun arose therein;

We’ve seen them all, yet no two are the same,

Peach or Marquee, enormous things or thin.

 

Ascending flocks of angels hide their eyes,

The sun and moon shall turn away their face,

White lightning bolts illuminate the skies

As thy behind is shown, from place to place.

 

Go thrust thy buttock through the window frame,

Let fancy fly at caution as it likes;

Reveal its oblate splendour without shame,

Give flying pigs a place to park their bikes.

 

Go then, like the ever-changing moon,

Or like some vast, mutating macaroon.

 

 

 

The Potato of Terror (Potato Tarquin Orbisfleur Terror III) (1968 ― ), winner of the Three-Toed Elvis Duck Award in 1998, is a modern sonneteer who became known chiefly for breaking new ground with the New Tuberism Movement and the noble Ponnet form of the sonnet. He commenced his early writings in a freezing cold garret over a Chinese restaurant in Bethnal Green. He has since been published in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry (Describe Adonis Press, Ottawa, © 2005), Sonnetto Poesia, Artvilla, Poetry Life & Times and Sara L Russell’s e-book, Spiders & Gliders.

 

 

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. 30 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/

 ***

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Closing Time at Laugharne.Poem.Marie Marshall.Sonnet.

by

 

I miss you – yes I do, you boozy Celt!

I’ve half a mind to hear you spin a yarn

While you, with pints of stout beneath your belt,

Traipse homewards through the rainy streets of Laugharne,

 From Brown’s Hotel, where we propped up the bar

Till closing time. What’s closing time to me

Or you? Come on ― the Boathouse isn’t far ―

Down to the sloe black, slow, black, crow black sea!

There’s pen and paper ready for your muse,

A bottle, and some glasses for a toast,

We’ll sit, and laugh, and rhyme a while, and booze ―

But, Duw, dear lad, you’re nothing but a ghost!

 –Can such as you go, gentle, into night,

 –Or did you rage against that dying light?

 

 

 

Marie Marshall (1957 — ) is an Anglo-Scottish author, poet and editor. Her first collection of poems, Naked in the Sea, was published in 2010 and reviewed in Sonnetto Poesia that same year, and her second collection, I am not a fish, in 2013. Since 2005 she has published over two hundred poems, mainly in magazines and anthologies, but the most extraordinary places in which a poem of hers has appeared include on the wall of a café in Wales, and etched into an African drum at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her first novel, Lupa, was published in 2012. She is well-known in Scotland for her macabre short stories. Her web site can be found at mairibheag.com. Of writing poetry and sonnets she says, “I did not start writing until 2004, so I am very much a twenty-first century writer. I write anything, any kind of poetry that I feel the urge to tackle ― sonnets included.”

 

 

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.

 

30 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/

***

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editor@artvilla.com

 

 

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Iliad, Book XVIII. Poem.Sonnet. Esther Cameron

by

 

The Iliad stands on the shelf beside

The breakfast table, a bookmark slowly making

 Its way through, as those ancient revenants glide

 Across yet one more screen, their gestures vacant

 Of so much we have known. No arch or column

 For them, no schools that labored to explain,

 No Phidias has poised the body’s volume

 Nor vase-painter contained it in a line.

 Their bodies are the only forms there are,

 Their gods that come and go like flaws of wind

 The only spirit. Conscience and eye are clear,

 Unshadowed by a thought of having sinned.

 Their poet, though, had guessed invention’s force ―

 Had seen robots, and automatic doors.

 

 

 

Esther Cameron (1941 — ) (a.k.a. E. Kam-Ron) is Editor-in-Chief of The Deronda Review (derondareview.org) and also has a multifaceted website, pointandcircumference.com. She has a PhD. and a J.D; her sonnets have appeared in B’Or Ha’Torah, Bellowing Ark, The Lyric, Sonnetto Poesia, The Susquehanna Review and Voices Israel, among others. Recent publications include Fortitude or the Lost Language of Justice: Poems in Israel’s Cause (Bitzaron, 2009) and a sonnet sequence, To Guard the Soul of Youth, in B’Or Ha’Torah 21. She is also one of the translators in a collection of Reuven Ben-Yosef’s poems, On the Bridge (Bitzaron, 2011). She was the judge of the 2011 Reuben Rose competition. She has written sonnets since the age of fifteen and feels that the form has mystic properties as well as being an efficient container of information.

 

 

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.

 

30 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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On a Night like Ovid.Poem.Constance Rowell Mastores.Sonnet

by

 

Every night he slipped the story on

like a second self, like a silk chemise his wife

once wore, like sepals overlapped around a bud,

like new bark on green skin, like a boy

in love with flowers— so naturally did it fit.

In the morning, the dream unraveled. It unspooled

and ran like water. His mind could not retrieve one pebble.

 …..…

The sun blew over him. He felt a chill.

Like a re-run of a classic. Someone had sold out,

was being hunted down, was running through the streets

of an old city, hopping a tram in the nick

of time, traveling backward, changing into something

more comfortable—the body of a girl, who fled

into the same irresistible sorrow, night after night.

 

 

Constance Rowell Mastores (1938— ) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley. She has graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkeley. She is a classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice. She and her husband, Kent “Nick” Mastores, live in Oakland, California. On her own poetry, she has this to say, “Rarely do I set out to write a 14 liner. Over the years, however, I have noticed that the poems I write that do result in 14 liners are preceded by a flow of sound— and sometimes a slight tingling in my fingers. The next stage is a fusion of emotion and idea set to some sort of rhythmical pattern. The words themselves may be born of depression; or of a keen observation of something in nature that has deeply moved me. In all cases, when I realize that I have resolved what I have to say in fourteen lines, I am incredibly happy.” Constance’s poetry appears in Paws & Tales, an anthology of poetry about animals, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, a book of selected poems, to be published by Blue Light Press in 2013; and in journals such as The Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Chronicles, The Comstock Review, Correspondences, The Deronda Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Lyric, The Magnolia Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rattapallax and Visions International.

 

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from: Richard Vallance, 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. 30 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: http://vallance22.hpage.com/ for further information.

***

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Ophelia.Poem.Sonnet.Sara L Russell

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Hamlet: Act III, Scene I. A Room in the Castle

Ophelia

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck’d the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh

That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth

 Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,

 To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

 William Shakespeare (1564―1616):

 

Ophillia

 

 

Adrift amid the bindweed, through the reeds,

Watching the sky with deep unblinking eyes,

She passes where the turquoise mayfly feeds,

Oblivious of all that swims or flies.

Red flowered chiffon billows to her hands

Open like water lilies in the sun,

Her skin’s the colour of tropical sands,

Her russet hair shines bright as copper spun.

Fabulous jewels languish on her breast,

Rich spoils of love rendered useless in death,

Her parted lips make unspoken behest;

The rosy portal of her final breath.

Now all is cold where roiling passion flamed,

As jealous earth mourns what the river claimed.

 

 

 

Sara Louise Russell , whose internet name is “PinkyAndrexa”, is a UK poet who has earned a well-deserved reputation as a highly respected twenty-first century poetry publisher and poet. She was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Life & Times, one of the world’s premier poetry E-zines, which ran monthly from 1998-2006 under her tutelage. She has always been in on the scene with graphic design, animation, 3D art, web design, sign writing, photography, film and poetry recital videos. Sara is founder and current editor of Poetry Lifetimes and the online Ning network The Video Poets. Her poetry has been published in Artvilla, AuthorsDen, Hello Poetry, The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry (Describe Adonis Press, Ottawa, © 2005), Sonnetto Poesia, Word Machinist and more, as well as in several e-books by Kedco Studios Inc. (USA). Her skills as a sonneteer are particularly remarkable.

 

 

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.

30 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/

 

***

Painting Ophelia John Millais

***

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Sea Song of the Crazy Poet.Poem.Sonnet.Sondra Ball(Deceased2010)

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It’s been a long time since I wrote a song.

I used to write beside the bay at night.

The music made me feel much less alone.

Night shadows forced a lashing, screaming fright.

Music was comforting. I’d sit and write

Until the sun wove light forms on the sea.

Then dawn would bind the shadows. I was free.

At last my music grew completely clear.

Then shadows shattered every pitch and rhyme.

They scream and dance. No note can stop my fear.

My loneliness grows with the measured time.

The shades are odorous. They smell like brine

The sea has tossed with rotting fish and shell,

Or like dead music, a stillborn dream or tale.

 

Sondra Ball (deceased March 17 2010) touched the lives of many with her passion, spirituality, intuition, outspokenness, and love. Born in Kentucky to migrant workers, an active Quaker and child of the Creek Nation, Sondra was passionate about race relations as well as the environment. An accomplished and passionate poet and writer, Sondra published the online poetry journal, Autumn Leaves, where she took great pleasure in encouraging new voices, especially among children and Native Americans. Sondra has been published many times in several anthologies, E-zines, journals and sites, such as Canadian Zen Haiku canadien ISSN 1705-4508, Matrifocus, Poetry of the Desert ISBN 0974197548, Spirits in Peace (see Richard Doiron) and Sonnetto Poesia.

 

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

30 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/

 

 

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