Thoughts…
What do “Kubla Khan” and the Great Gatsby have in common?
Did you ever think of drawing a straight thematic line from a passage in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge? As every reader of Coleridge knows, his poem is a fragment of the several hundred lines he had composed in his...
Decreation in My Poetry and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman”
A theme that courses through the poems in The Art of Darkness section of my book is the desire to decreate myself, to experience a “soft retreat of senses/And a slow dance to/Self and lessness.” In “Prelude,” I write of my “discovery/And subsequent/Shedding of...
Why “A Consecration of the Wind”?
Wind represents change, and the consecration of wind elevates that transformation to a spiritual level. Many of my poems reflect a desire to change, to leave parts of myself behind, to become someone else. That denial of self had its origins in childhood, thanks in...
How My Writing Style Has Changed
Through my junior high and high school years, my poems were very religious, reflecting my strict Catholic upbringing. My senior year creative writing teacher pointed that fact out to me after reviewing my portfolio. She also ridiculed one of my religious poems in...
Should Your Poems Have a Regular Meter and a Structured Rhyme Scheme?
Forget for a moment the rules of prosody and other constraints placed upon the poets of the past. Forget that Shakespeare composed 154 sonnets predominately in iambic pentameter. Forget that the Romanticists used rhyme in their lofty odes. Just think! Do your thoughts...
