Category Archives: Free Verse

Iconic [Free Verse]

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Bruce Lee statue by Cao Chong-En located on the Avenue of Stars, Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Everyone gets to be a person,
   Few become icons:

 What is it to have a lasting 
      image more well-known 
          than one's work? 

 Che Guevara, Bruce Lee,
    Heath Ledger's Joker -- 

 Images you can find on 
   back-alley walls from Lagos
   to Prague to Kochi
   to Seoul to Santiago
       and back again. 

Seen day-after-day by people
   who never saw Enter the Dragon
   or read of the Cuban Revolution,
   or saw Nolan's Batman Trilogy,
      but they know the faces. 

They have thoughts about them
      -- and, sometimes, strong feelings --
   just like so many people have 
   thoughts about Alexander the Great 
       based solely on his name
       and a rough impression of history.

What must this be...
    blessing or curse ...
       if icons had some way to care?

Spring Swerve [Free Verse]

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Photograph taken at Jvari Pass in the Republic of Georgia as a rain cloud works up the valley. The previous day, it had snowed. 
Spring can swerve.

White patches,
   holdouts from yesterday's snow, 
      are melted by today's rains. 

Buds no sooner form
   than are encased in ice.

No self-respecting Summer
   day could bring snow.

Winter won't hatch
   a butterfly.

Autumn can't turn
   a red leaf back to green.

But Spring can swerve.

Ivy & Stone [Free Verse]

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Taken in the Old City of Baku, Azerbaijan.
There's something relentless
   in an old stone wall...
 But, also, cold and dead.
   One knows it will not stand forever --
       that it will go the way of
       ruins, rubble, stones, and dust --
       but, still, it can outstand any man. 
 Ivy climbs to camouflage the stone's
    cruel deathlessness,
 But then the ivy stands on the wall
    year after year after year...

Mobile Home [Common Meter]

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Turtle exits its hiding place
   beneath a rotten log.
 Its shell snags on that old, dead wood
   he drags the log along.
 Does he know that he's double-shelled?
   He seems so unaware.
 When he breaks free, he gains no speed --
   just crawls on like he don't care.

Stumped [Free Verse]

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Photo taken on the Butch Kennedy Hiking Trail near Lake Hartwell in South Carolina. 
A stump in the forest
   is like a gap in a
   wedding party photo
   where they photoshopped
   out a renegade relative,
      but forgot to erase
      the person's loafers.

Information Boneyard [Free Verse]

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The Information Age 
   bloomed & died
   from wave after wave 
   of information inflation 
   and counterfeit information -
      cheap knockoffs flooded
      the market!

 We live in a
   post-information world:
   an information junkyard,
   to be precise.

 Rusting, useless detritus 
   poses as treasure.
 We catch glints
   and think it value,
 But even turds can glitter 
   in the Sun.

Candles [Free Verse]

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Ancient cathedral: 
   pews & altar
     long gone.
 Cold air creeps 
   through cracks
      to flicker candles,
 Candles lit for
   those long dead —
      though long remembered —
      on a cold, winter day.

BOOKS: “The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway”

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The suppressed poemsThe suppressed poems by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Available online – Public Domain

I read this book because my curiosity was piqued by a reference to poems Hemingway published in Der Querschnitt, a reference that was made in a biography of Hemingway I’ve been reading recently (Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway by Jeffrey Meyers.) Five of the seventeen poems in the book are from Der Querschnitt. (Ten of the poems were published in a book entitled Three Stories and Ten Poems and a couple are odds and ends.)

The Der Quershnitt pieces are bawdy by 1920’s standards, though not particularly for today. The other poems can be a bit intense, dealing in subjects like death in war (Champs D’Honneur,) suicide (Montparnasse, and a curse upon literary critics (Valentine,) but tend to be a bit more refined (excepting Valentine. which may be the least elevated of the collected poems.)

The poems include a mix of lyric, free verse, and prose poem, though all are fairly short (the longest, The Soul of Spain, fits in three pages.)

My favorite was a short lyric poem entitled The Age Demanded, which considers the paradox of the 1920’s as a progressive age, restrained. I also found T. Roosevelt to be fascinating because in the act of critiquing Teddy Roosevelt, Hemingway (wittingly or not) gives us a bit of autobiography. (i.e.“And all the legends that he started in his life // Live on and prosper, // Unhampered now by his existence.”)

I give Hemingway more credit for saying interesting things by virtue of being bold than for saying anything in a particularly interesting way, but it’s enough to make these poems worth reading.

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A Space Between [Free Verse]

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The space between

   this & that,

   us & them,
  
   then & now,
 
   now & later.

 The pregnant pause —
   a pause without cause —

 Just senseless nothing
   in between.

BOOK: “The Ruins” by Ye Hui [Trans. by Dong Li]

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The Ruins: PoemsThe Ruins: Poems by Hui Ye
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site — Deep Vellum

This is a Chinese-English bilingual edition of Ye Hui’s first poetry collection. The poems use stark imagery with occasional instances of philosophizing and surreal statements to create a vivid and provocative set of poems.

As I’m learning Chinese, it was nice to have the original poems in Simplified Chinese script next to the English translations. While I’m not up to a reading level sufficient to taking on Modern Poetry (any poetry for that matter,) it was useful to peruse the Chinese text. I did appreciate how much vibrance the author wrings out of a relatively simple vocabulary.

I’d highly recommend this collection for poetry readers.

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