Saturday, 25 August 2007

Charles Wright, Charlie Mehrhoff and That One Nagging Question

Today is the birthday of the poet Charles Wright, whose recent volume, Scar Tissue, I am currently struggling with mightily.  More palatable, at least for me, is the poem " Last Supper" by Wright, from his collection The Wrong End of the Rainbow, and posted on the poets.org website.

For a decidedly more small press approach to things, you might want to check out the website of exemplary poet Charlie Mehrhoff, one of our finest practitioners of the short form and someone I've had the honor to publish both in Lilliput Review and as part of the Modest Proposal Chapbook series.   From his collection One Hand Clapping in that series comes the following:

Hammer your  begging bowl

into oblivion

 

hold that

up to the light.

And this:

All of the oceans,

all of the lakes

streams

and clouds

represent the sum of all written and oral

knowledge.

The skin of the skin of a drop of dew evaporating

is what has been revealed to me,

is what overwhelms my being:

and so little of that am I capable of translating.

 

From issue #115 of Lillie, this little gem:

on the Conan Doyle shelf

my lost reading glasses

wiped clean

~ LeRoy Gorman

 

And, hopefully, committing these words to the page, an old poet friend went some of the distance to their denial

All those

I have mourned

will die

with my dying:

my mother's hopes,

and my father's doom:

all the faces,

all the rooms.

~ Albert Huffstickler

A number of Shakespeare sonnets, such as, and Shelley again (see the August 4th entry of this blog) ...

Posted by donw714 at 10:54 EDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 30 August 2007 07:46 EDT

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