amazing maze

Here’s a maze. The Hampton Court maze, to be precise. Does anyone picture the Minotaur’s maze as something like this — as a hedge maze?
Would Minos have commissioned the famed architect Daedalus to design a hedge maze? And would such leafy hedginess have been capable of imprisoning a raging half-bull-monster with vast grievances for years and years?
But Julie points to [...]

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The Minotaur

Inside the Maze by Hadara Bar-Nadav from Poetry Daily.
By and large this worked very well indeed for me. I’m always a sucker for thoughts from inside famous dead heads. In this case, the Minotaur. Smooth choice of detail and I like how the thoughts run on from each other and the overall feel of the [...]

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A woodpecker, a horse and the sun

On a Woodpecker Drinking from a Knothole Still Full of the Last Rain by Maurice Manning, from Verse Daily.
Lots to like here, starting with the title. Just too cool – so beautifully long and almost a poem in itself and the content of the piece such a non sequitur on the face of it. Nice [...]

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The dead, a sparrow and palmetto fronds

Why Bother Resurrecting the Dead by Jane Springer, from Verse Daily.
I read this as a doctrinal poem, in the sense that the narrator seems to be laying out a credo. One that is not in favor of organized religion and perhaps, more specifically, not enamored of Christianity’s tenets – the concept of life after death, [...]

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Getting back in gear

I started this blog back in November 2006, with the intention of using it as a place to review randomly selected internet-published poetry, figuring that grappling critically with other people’s work would be one of the best ways to define weaknesses and build on strengths in my own. 
That was before I fully realized how, um, bad the standing of negative critique [...]

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Critical Slough of Despond

Still in a very plastic hot-wax indeterminate sort of state about critiquing others’ poetry. Where I used somehow to be able to just march in briskly say oh, yes, this and oh, yes, that, I now don’t seem to be able to determine what this or that or anything else is any more.
Once a writer [...]

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