Poets and Poems: Bruce Lawder and “Breakwater Rock”

It must be a phenomenon of age, but as I’ve gotten older, my visits to my hometown of New Orleans have become less frequent. At the same time, my emotional ties have become stronger, evidenced by the growing number of New Orleans-themed Facebook groups I’ve joined.  

Most of the reason for less frequent visits is family. My childhood was highlighted by the sheer number of relatives, entirely from my mother’s large family, who lived there. Now they’re gone, scattered to cities, towns, and cemeteries all over the South. I have a single cousin left living in New Orleans.

 

No, you can’t go home again, except in your memory. Poet Bruce Lawder discovered that when he visited the town where he grew up. The place is still there, but it presents a sense of dislocation. Most things have changed; even those that seem the same aren’t quite the way you remember them. (I sympathize; the backyard of the house where I grew up has shrunken dramatically from what I remember as a child.)

 

Lawder did what poets do; he wrote poems. His newest collection, Breakwater Rock: Poems,” is comprised mostly of poems he wrote before and after his hometown visit.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Fame is a fickle food,” poem by Emily Dickenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Collage: Unwrapping Gifts from the Quiet – Ethany Rohde at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction – Dean Flower at The Hudson Review on Henry James.

 

The Art of the Critic – Nick Ripatrazone at The Metropolitan Review.

 

“No, Thank You, John,” poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Bruce Lawder: Prose Poems, (Very) Short Fiction, or Both?

Poetic stories have been around ever since there were stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, scholars say, was written sometime between 2150 and 1400 B.C. Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey sometime in the 9th or 8^th century B.C. Closer to our own time, John Milton wrote his epic poems in the 1600s, and in the 19^th century we had epic poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But our attention spans have grown shorter, as have our poems and our novels (a few contemporary Europeans notwithstanding). 

It's not necessarily a bad thing. Writing short, or writing short well, requires laser-like focus, concise words, and abandoning adverbs. In Dwarf Stories, his most recent poetry collection, Bruce Lawder does exactly that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Journeys: What We Hold in Common – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“The Antenna,” poem by Mia Anderson – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Alistair Begg with Biblical Wisdom for Voting – Truth for Life.

 

“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” poem by Samuel Johnson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Or Did You Think Crushed Hopes Couldn’t Reawaken? – poem by Hedy Habra at Every Day Poems.