A Random Parasite Bemoans the Fallen Light

From glorious clouds to wayward seas, to earth’s horizon and below, Opines our muted panoply: “Intuit in green, oh, stubbornness,” “Oh, humans failing us, forefend, Who forthright with their undertow align our cosmos in their schemes.” For we take it as opining, and think the war is one of ours, But yet contests of water, bowers, Are not ours to direct. We shrink from humble servitude To all we should be sustained by, To us, our faces are supreme in photographs, in ego’s memes, And we do not involve the earth Except to think it photo-bombed us in our pictures of ourselves. Background, we think, because we fear To know we could destroy our source, These are my flowers, we say to friends, Look! Blooming here, my peonies, Or on the hills, this is my gorse, And it’s so much the easier to…

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William Carlos Williams: Paterson  •  Tom Lachais:Three Hundred Streets of Venice California • Calvin Wharton: This Here Paradise 

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Paterson by William Carlos Williams. £20. Carcanet Classics. ISBN: ‎ 978-1800173613
reviewed by Tom Phillips

The poetry that falls within the broad category of modernism however we want to definite that exhibits two opposite tendencies, both driven by a desire to – in Ezra Pound’s words – ‘make it new’: one essentially minimalist, the other essentially maximalist. On the one hand, there are haiku-esque Imagist miniatures; on the other, The Waste Land, The Cantos, Four Quartets, Paterson, Maximus Poems, Briggflats and so on. Despite the flourishing of the former, long or at least longish poems are as much a part of the landscape of modernism as they are of romanticism, neo-classicism et al. Don’t just make it new, in other words, make it big.
Most immediately, perhaps, the…

photo from pixabay (Klau2018)

Bio of Steve can be found here: https://www.flinders.edu.au/people/steve.evans

Sending You a River

In the second part of this poem,
I will be played by a different actor
with the wrong accent

so, I’m cancelling the subscription
to my own newsletter
after first writing a letter of complaint,

and if I hear another love song
rhyming start and heart,
I think I’ll rip the singer’s chest apart.

But for now, I’m sending you a river,
one mouthful at a time —
not quite enough to drown in.

And Then

And then he kissed her,
in French
without subtitles.

Her Love Poems for Others She offers them to me as if to tease, testing the bounds of my jealousies. The answer’s clear, and merciless. I admire their highwire plays and twists, their luxurious, earthing lust for place, but wrench to imagine her this way. I’m not proud of…

“I see all the things we write and publish as markers in time.”

Follow this link to my Substack page to find out what’s happening: Substack

side to side

You sent me a tape Three, four… Five states away. I listened Flipping it side to side In the old boombox, Drinking in the songs Like a drowning man Lost at sea. We spoke little in those days Before we didn't speak at all. You sent letters written in lyrics, A code for me to decipher. Flipping side to side, Searching for hidden truths And some answer to the question I could never bring myself To ask out loud. You fancied yourself a punk But the ribbons were filled With acoustic and folk - Lush guitars, Poems spoken and sung. I played them Until the tapes Were dirty and worn, Always flipping side to side. So many moons and Junes Have passed, Years of your silence While I tried to crack the code, Flipping side to side. I think that final letter Always said it all; The…