Today in 1770 William Wordsworth was born. Students of literary history will know Wordsworth as one of the founders of the Romantic movement, which debuted with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth’s partner was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of my heroes. One of the criticisms you’ll find of contemporary culture is that people…
Category Archives: Musings
Self Publishing Poetry: The Problem With Vanity
The Internet has made self publishing a whole lot easier. In many respects that’s a good thing. Were it not for the ease of use of capable technology, financial accessibility of the platform, and the internal drive to pursue it, I would not be able to write and publish this blog. All poetry bloggers owe…
Guest Blogger: The Simulacra, Context, and Poetry
Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher, wrote Simulations and Simulacra in the early 1980s. In this book, Baudrillard takes on two major themes of a postmodern society that lead to an interesting problem: the loss of the Real. For this entry, I will focus just on the simulacra of Simulations and Simulacra in the context of…
Can Serious Literature Be Read Online?
I didn’t catch the full debate, but I did enjoy reading this essay by Kevin Kelly, which asks if serious literature can be read online or if it should be relegated to print books. Well, that’s the gist as I understand it. It’s a good question. I’ve noticed that there seems to be prejudice against…
Why Narrative Poetry Is So Damn Hard To Write
I love narrative poems, but they’re hard to write. Anyone who thinks narrative poetry is easy to write has obviously never tried to write one. The reasons I think narrative poems are difficult are many, but in a nutshell: The struggle is in maintaining a balance between the narrative and the poetics Too much narrative…
What I’ve Been Spending My Time On Lately
I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve been extremely busy and I can’t say it’s all been work. Though work is a huge part of my life. I write a handful of blogs and manage many more. If you’ve never seen my local tourism blog – The…
Webster’s Word Of The Year – Overshare
A very sweet lady who attends my church, a couple of weeks ago, asked me if I’d heard of Dana Gioia. Of course, as my regular readers know, I have. She wanted to know how I knew of him and I spent about 30 minutes filling her ear with the war between New Formalism and…
The Time Value Of Literature: Can We Bank On It?
Who decides whether a piece of literature is good or not? Is there a committee somewhere that decides by a process of selection? Does it allow for vote by proxy? Is there a monarch or a king that raises his scepter in approbation? Perhaps all the people of the world can gather together and conduct…
Supply Side Literature: Do You Write For The Market?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that most literary artists, poets included, try in some way to “write for the market.” But I think this is a sorry way to write literature. Beyond sorry. It’s inane. While all literature is in a certain sense targeted toward a particular market – try…
Kudos To Neil Gaiman For Getting Icky With Free Speech
Neil Gaiman is the author of several lines of fantasy graphic novels. His first, Sandman, made a historic debut as an intelligent and thought-provoking graphic series. I enjoyed reading it myself in the 1980s and 1990s. As an evangelical Christian, I feel like I exist in two worlds. In the first world, the one in…
