This will be a poetry blog. I'll post my own poems, links to poems that I like, usually by not well-known poets, and comments on poetry.

I like and try to write poetry that’s clear and accessible and evokes for the reader the feelings that inspired the poem. I don't care for cryptic, obscure or highly ambiguous poems or poems in which the feeling is buried under layers of intellectualization. I subscribe to Wordsworth’s dictum “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” As most aphorisms, this exaggerates, but the core connection of poetry with feelings is true for me. For my taste too much contemporary poetry subordinates feeling to intellectual display.

For the most part I have favorite poems rather than favorite poets, but some of the poets I particularly like are Antonio Machado, Ferlinghetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, May Swenson and Tony Hoagland. I also particularly like a series of poems called “County Lives” by the Irish poet and novelist, Dermot Bolger and Rilke’s Duino Elegies, not a model of accessibility but extremely evocative. Similarly I like Eliot's early poems and the “Four Quartets”, also not very accessible but wonderfully evocative, but I don't like ‘The Waste Land” which I see as disjointed and unnecessarily obscure. And I like the early Pound, but not the Cantos.

A few favorite well-known poems and poems by more or less well-known poets, in no particular order: Auden's “Look stranger at this island now”, Browning's “Home Thoughts from Abroad”, Hopkins’ “The Windhover”, Donald Hall's “The Name of Horses”, Bertold Brecht's “Concerning Poor B.B”, Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill”, Jame's Merrill's "164 East 72nd Street", Elizabeth Bishop's “At the Fishouses”, and even more her less well-known and atypical “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”. Maybe that'll give you an idea of my tastes, or maybe it'll just confuse you, but you will find, if you don't already know, that all these poems combine clarity with feeling.

I've created this blog with the hope of broadening my audience and would very much like to hear from you if you liked it (leave me a comment by clicking on the comment button at the bottom of this posting) or, for that matter, if you didn't, which would at least give me some idea of how many people I'm reaching and whether the blog is worth continuing. I’m going to wait for responses to see if I have an audience before doing more postings, so if you’re potentially interested, let me know.

Here are a few samples of my poetry. You can find more on my website at http://www.greenepage.net/ and in my recently published book, "Explorations", available at http://www.antrimhousebooks.com/. The write-up of the book on the Antrim House website, also includes a small sample of poems if you don’t want to get into the much larger selection on my website.

Pie

Apple, blueberry, cherry, peach,
coconut custard, banana cream,
boyhood’s soft-focus dreams.

I used to stop at the bakery
on the way home from school
to buy an individual pie
one just the size for a boy
but an aunt with whom I stayed for a while
forbade me them,
deeming pies bad for one’s health.
Seeing me once munching one
as I ambled home
she gave me a scolding so fierce
I flinch from it to this day
when pie is forbidden me again
under the strictures of age.

Shades of Simple Simon,
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn,
and maybe Adam too,
for what do you suppose was his favorite dish
after that first taste of sin?
Which leads me to a metaphysical question,
was pie designed for boys
or boys for pie?


Cotapaxi

Just below a great snowy cone in the Andes
on a broad flat shelf of mountain
wild horses race
keeping pace
with wind-driven clouds overhead,
breath steaming
long manes swirling,
exhilarated,
as if created
just moments before
out of the primordial chaos.


Boots on the Ground

Put boots on the ground, they said,
as if they were dragons’ teeth
which, sown, sprout spectral armies
that fade away, once battle is done,
leaving no blood behind.

They said nothing about
the men and boys
who would no longer have feet
to wear those boots,
or would wear them to their graves.


Silver Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair

as if some cunning craftsman
had spun metal
into silken thread.
It was chestnut brown when we met.
Her skin, all smooth then,
has begun to show fine webs
and is slack under her once firm chin.
But, when I look on her, I think
this is the girl I wed
and feel the need to kiss her cheek
or, if she’s bent over some task,
the nape of her neck
or, if she’s sitting with the hem of her dress
resting on her thighs,
to reach out and touch her knee.