Tag: poetry

Poem: Why Me?

poem? © Jeffrey Beaty
March 28, 2022 — 3 AM

I felt the need to write this… thing. Technically not a poem. I question whether it can even be classified free verse. But the act of pulling it out of me resulted in a weird combination of pseudo meter and pseudo structured lines, mixed with long run-on bits of normal prose. Anyway, it had that feeling I occasionally get when I find myself turning poetic whether or not the results qualify as that — an intense need to express something that I can’t quite communicate even to myself. I cropped, simplified, reordered and structured a little making it at least a little more poetic, in form if not fact, until it felt at least in part like what I needed to say.

Read the Poem

Not Lost…

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

J. R. R. TolkienI love this quote and it means many things to me. Just this line alone is awesome, but the entire stanza of the poem that it comes from is also pretty amazing and deep and bears quoting too. So for good measure, here’s that stanza:

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Lamb & Tyger – Innocence & Experience

I caught a reference to William Blake‘s “The Tyger” in, of all things, a graphic novel I was reading. I recognized it, having read it a long time ago, and recalled it’s elegant way of contrasting the beauty and the ferocity of the animal. I wanted to read the whole thing and learn a little more. Discovered that the poem was in a collection of poems intended to be song lyrics, called Songs of Experience. A previous poetry collection of Blake’s was the Songs of Innocence and contained the sister poem “The Lamb“. Continue reading Lamb & Tyger – Innocence & Experience

The Still Point of the Turning World…

T. S. EliotI discovered the poem “Burnt Norton” in a recent post from Brain Pickings, a blog I have really found engaging on multiple levels. So many thoughts and literary works it has brought to my attention that I have wanted to pursue. But there is so much to read, so little time, and I DO so love my Sci-Fi & Fantasy escapes.

Anyway, back to the point. Below is a bit of the poem “Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot which is all about Time and our perception of it, and a little about writing & poetry, and how the universe and our bit of time in it, does have an order (Logos), and that writing and poetry is our attempts to encapsulate a bit of that order, that bit of time, into our own mutable words. I need to study this poem much more, as there are parts that I don’t quite grasp but “feel”. Continue reading The Still Point of the Turning World…