It is our policy to publish quality poetry only when it is accompanied by commentary by the author. We hope this will give readers a perspective beyond that which they might bring to the poem from their own experience and which might help them in their own struggle to write.
Poems with Commentary:
- Jeffrey C Alfier
"The poetic elusiveness was a kind of silence as Ungaretti tried to grasp man's sense of something great that had been lost within him."
- carlos barrios
"I have always felt the power trapped in the simple use of language."
- Carrie Berry
"I was thinking about a certain kind of love which one can literally 'wear'."
- Jack Gregory Bowman
"I was encouraged by my own therapist to 'transform' anxiety and depression into art."
- Don "Kingfisher" Campbell
"When I started to feel the load become too great, I turned to poetry. While I may have let it down on occasion, it has never failed me."
- Mark Cassidy
"..what I see becoming symbolic coat hooks, on which spiritual or metaphysical reflection can sometimes hang."
- Nic Coleman
"..so often poetry is written by outsiders; the intellectual parson who imagines that he knows what is in the heart of the ploughman."
- Cyberclem
"..it's the poet's duty to produce faith the way a stage magician yanks the silk off sudden tigers."
- Dave Durham
Poetry as "therapy", yes. Poetry as "redemption"? Hmm.
- Anne Forrest
"The "Eight Pieces of Brocade" series may be the closest approach to a signature work that I have ever produced."
- em franco
"You feel something inside of you stir, and you say to yourself -
There must be poetry here somewhere."
- Jay Frankston
"So it is, like Leonard Cohen said, that the hopes and aspirations of a whole generation were swallowed up, sucked into a black hole, never to be heard from again."
- John Gregory
"I catch a snippet of poetic sound (in a conversation, in a dictionary, on the side of a bus) and other words gather around it in my mind and start growing organically like a crystal (or a fractal, as the case may be)."
- Paula Grenside
"The poet has a way to react, to denounce, to shout, to rebel: writing! With the hope someone will read/listen."
- Margaret Hicks
"Have you ever had one of those moments where you find your pen making marks on the paper and you don t know what it s doing?"
- John Horváth Jr
"Poetry's best use is not in confessing one's own passions and life but in observing, entering the other, exploring, and introducing the reader so that compassion, empathy, a sense of 'being in this together' can be achieved."
- Ian Irvine
"The poems published here," writes Ian, "represent a very important chapter in my attempts to come to terms with the darker side of 'secularism'."
- David Jones
"The words, are about the music, the 'landscape/skyscape in the music'"
- Ward Kelley
"So in my mind am I a businessman who writes poetry, or a very minor poet successful at business? Who knows? Yet I tread carefully with this balance for fear my daimon will leave me, or my greed will taunt me for decades."
- Jo Neace Krause
"I think that is what the voice in the poem seeks, another existence through sound and rhythm..."
- Michael Largo
"This poem arose from a transitional stage of life, when I had no ability to stop myself from destroying the things that were good and wholesome."
- Tim Love
Tim traces a thread of development through four of his poems, seeking to weave together personal experience with impersonal knowledge.
- Chris Major
The marriage of graphic illustration with the potency of words to achieve something more accessible to those who might shy away from more traditional poetic forms.
- David S Minjares
"The trip to the beach and the sea washing over my feet certified the death knoll of my life as a recluse."
- Christopher Mulrooney
"A duty devolved upon the writer, to disgorge his contents and fulfill its requirements. Saying so is for him."
- Bryan Murphy
A negative portrait
- Laurence Overmire
Laurence tells us how for him poetry has become a 'diary in art'.
- Stephen Pain
"a modern pastoral"
- Nate Pritts
"As a poet I think I should stop blathering and let my work do the talking but as a reader, I'm endlessly fascinated by what people have to say about process, so I offer my own."
- Thachom Poyil Rajeevan
"An accomplished poem is a piece of life — an unwritten poem is a marginalised, downtrodden social existence or experience."
- David Ritchie
"it is not the publication of the poem that is foremost any longer, but the actual sharing it with other sincere poets"
- Max Roth
"The professor immediately seized upon my comment, shouting out from the rear of the class a simple one-word question, 'Why?'"
- Harding Stedler
"One thing writing is, is discovery."
- Les Wicks
"Prayer of the Morning" is a part of an ongoing search in my work for a definition of the Australian soul. A gentle, tolerant (even if by virtue of laziness) and quietly anarchic country."
- Janis Wiley
"These pieces are the result of my experience with some beautiful children in a not so beautiful situation."
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