Watch my poetry readings on YouTube
I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of my writing and interests in culture, history and literature. To begin the channel I…
Tag: poetry
My collected poems published and on sale now
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020 in both a print and e-book edition. You can…
A task: from Milosz to me
This morning I read this poem. “A task” by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected poems. It reminded me of the post I made on reading this poem initially…
The poet W as comedian
Wallace Stevens is a poet of comedy, and comedy relieves the distress of tragic history. Comedy reconciles the restless, Romantic imagination with the present and the real. When the world falls apart, one must cultivate one’s garden, but also tell some comic stories over dinner. It is comedy, not alone but inseparable, that moves the infinite conversation on.
Three tankas on my garden
Over the last difficult year my garden has been a constant companion and a source of renewal and strength. Here are three tankas composed in thanks for my garden. I…
A revelation from Rumi
This morning I read some poems from Hafez (c 1315-1390) that celebrated love and wine and striving of a mysticism. Notwithstanding the art, the sentiments left me cold, and so…
Ezra Pound, the unavowable fury of thy true heritage in fragments
The story of Ezra Pound’s mind cannot be told in plain and simple affirmations. Three twisted trees grow from this mind in all accounts: poetry, unavowable politics, and madness. They…
Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of…
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts – or let us call them essays – on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming…
Report from a besieged city (Melbourne)
Today 12 February, Melbourne and all the citizens of Victoria have been thrown, with eleven hours notice, again into a futile, fickle lockdown that is not founded in evidence of…
Cantos from a cage
Today I am reposting this reflection on the true heritage of Ezra Pound, Cantos from a cage, which I originally posted in April 2018. I have borrowed from the local…
This grey spirit seeking a sinking star
But more so than the moulted carapace of governing that lies at my feet, I connected to the adventurer of the spirit, weakened by age and misfortune, that Tennyson saw in Ulysses. It was this grey spirit that I turned to this morning for the courage to continue.
