The Poetry Corner 3rd Edition Volume 2

I’m slowing it down a little now.  I think I’ll be publishing a new volume about once or twice  a month perhaps, we will see.  Much of it depends on what I find when I search out the recent additions to poetry here on wordpress.  Then again I’ve been kicking around the idea of accepting submissions for review.  If you happen to like what I’m doing here and would like to be featured in an up and coming volume of The Poetry Corner, please send a link of an already posted poem on your blog to me via e-mail and I will review your submission.  Be for warned, I may decide to showcase a poem of yours that you did not submit as a result of my visit to your blog.  Please only provide one submission per week.  I retain the right of my freedom of speech and will review all submissions in my own time, showcasing poets and poems of my choice when the moment presents itself.

He’s been around for a while and featured here at least once before.  Charles Coakley Simpson continues to produce poetry of the highest calibur, each that I read engenders emotion, usually of some dark longing related to romance or unrequited love, though every now and then, Charles delivers a piece with tongue so firmly in cheek that I fear he may wind up biting it off.  Mousetrap is a jaunt down lyrical rhythm and rhyme that is accompanied well by the picture.  The only thing better, I imagine, would be to hear him read it himself.

An artist she is, as well as a talented poet.  I was struck first by the title, then by the picture and last by the words and lines of the poem  The picture is striking in it’s candor and feminine form while at the same time presenting the idea of vulnerability and insecurity.  The subject is ‘disjointed’ and incomplete though not abandoned by her maker, whoever that may be.  The poem, “Disjointed,” speaks of a disconnection with the inevitable future and the knowledge of such.  She speaks of a surrender to the flow of events and the seas of possibility.  Other visual work of Gypsy Moth include, “eleMentals” and “The Night Monkeys“, and I find her artistic style particularly appealing.

I’ve always been a big fan of Robert Frost and his poem, The Road Not Taken.  It touched me deeply and I think it teaches much that one would benefit from his words.  About paths of life and decisions made, the immutable past and the uncertain future, he wrote eloquently.  Mike writes about a similar experience in the present day and an alternate method of dealing with the decisions that face us.  Perhaps “The Road Not Taken (Update)” is a comment on the necessity of adaptation to the changing of times, or perhaps it is just the frustrated and comical writings of a person who’s found a better solution to the problems of undesired situations.  Either way, Mike’s poem caused me to smile in a way that I’d almost forgotten, and to chuckle about our ability to put tongue firmly in cheek about even the frustrating experiences and how to persevere.

It is not every day that I come across a poem that so challenges my preconceived notions of what a good poem is, and at the same time, draws me to read it again and again in an effort to understand the almost supernatural pull I feel towards it’s unconventional construction and flow.  Adam Dustus has achieved something that few poets have, draw me into a poem, that, in some ways also repels me.  By Literal Heights is a poem that is cryptic and disjointed, and yet lends the aura of connection between the lines, not in some easy manner but with some kind of spiritual or supernatural draw that keeps me coming back to reread the lines, ever seeking to understand more of myself and more of the poet.

~ by An Imperfect Servant on 07/28/2009.