Category Archives: Poetry

Charles Bukowski Meets Another Poet

by Editor | 4 Comments

bukowskiThe Rumpus has a piece that Charles Bukowski wrote as a forward to a book of poems by William Wantling in 1974.  He writes about meeting the other poet for the first time and liking him.  It must have been a big thing to be liked by Bukowski because he seems to have a problem with most people.  His piece is touching and shows how sensitive Bukowski really was to the unspoken things.

He writes a bit about style and says:

Style means no shield at all.
Style means no front at all.
Style means ultimate naturalness.
Style means one man alone with billions of men about.

Is that really it?  Boy, Bukowski would have hated me to the ends of his toes because I’m always arguing my point.  The problem I have with what he’s saying there is that he made a living by writing with the biggest shield of all in front of him.  A bottle.  It’s the best shield there is.  Bullet-proof.  So he must be wrong about style.

New Film: Lunch With Bardot

by Cimaxion



My latest little film. It’s actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn’t exist. You can’t find it with measurement. You can’t even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is the past. I say that because we can all see the past – some more clearly than others. But we can most certainly see it.

A cinegram is a short motion picture that uses images and text that are packed with meaning and suggestion. It’s my new word for things I once referred to as film poems.

Here’s the poem from inside the movie:

Lunch With Bardot

Trains run on time
With passengers asleep
Temporarily forgotten
Between observation points
Colliding lines
Of fictional transport

Hear Walt Whitman Reading His Poem ‘America’

by Editor | 1 Comment

The Walt Whitman Archive has a 36-second recording taken from an old wax cylinder of what is thought to be Whitman himself reading four lines from his poem, America.

Listen to Walt Whitman reading America

Here’s the text of the poem:

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

A Little Poetry Contest: The Winner

by Editor

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Sascha Cooper is our Little Poetry Contest winner.  Her poem, A Blank Canvas, is a meditation on the power of creativity in normal surroundings.  We didn’t get many poems for the contest so it only makes sense to pick a single winner.  Perhaps more poets will want to enter the next Little Poetry Contest.  But this poem would stand out in any group of poems.  Actually, I was quite surprised to receive a poem this good during the very first contest.

You can listen to the winning poem with the player above while you read it here.

A Blank Canvas

Inspiration comes from all seeing eyes.
Let the imagination run wild
With all colours that light up at night.

Outside the window looms a palace
With domes that stretch up to the sky.
Stuck in time, yet current;

Transporting me back to a time of
Princes, kings and queens.
Arabian nights coax and tempt me.

Back in the land of reality,
The box is blaring, mum is cooking
And my best friend is next to me.

The computer is on a small table
That was a shelf – makeshift, but handy.
Drink and numerous papers at my side.

White walls, sleek lines;
Carpet that’s light and not right,
Sliding doors of black and silver.

All this in a box of glass
Ready to be personalised.
A blank canvas.

Audio Poem: Ode to a Nightingale

by Editor

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For the last day of National Poetry Month 2009, here’s a reading of Ode to a Nightingale, by English poet John Keats.  It was written in 1819 after the poet had been listening to a nightingale in the yard of a friend one morning.

Here is the text of the poem:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

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Podcast of Henry David Thoreau on Poetry and Writing

by Editor

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In 1839, Henry David Thoreau and his brother made a river voyage in a boat that they built themselves. This voyage became the subject of Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849 at his own expense. In this thirty-three minute excerpt, Thoreau finds himself describing the incredible beauty and serenity of the natural scene around him. But his mind wanders into a profound examination of poetry and the requirements of good writing. His call to man for a life of poetry and his demand that writers create simply from an impulse to action are powerful and true. I don’t think there is a better piece of advice that exists for writers and readers alike.

Thoreau frequently quotes from Homer’s Iliad and other sources in this piece. I have tried to separate his quotes with pauses and a change in reading tone. You might want to glance at the actual words as you listen for clarification.

Here is the text of the reading:

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which
would be in harmony with the scenery,–for if men read aright,
methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor
philosophy can supply their place.

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