The Virtual Anthology Installment Seven

To begin, one of the finest introductions to a book ever committed:
Charles Baudelaire's "To the Reader"
"To the Reader"

Daryl Hine "Apollonian Epiphany"
"Apollonian Epiphany"

Sylvia Plath "Blackberrying"
"Blackberrying"

Robert Frost "Fire and Ice"
"Fire and Ice"

William Butler Yeats "On being asked for a War Poem"
" ON BEING ASKED FOR A WAR POEM"

The Virtual Anthology - Installment Six

John Donne "Go and Catch a falling star..."
"Go and catch a falling star..."

Louis MacNeice, "Snow"
"Snow"

G K Chesterton "A Ballad of Suicide"
"A Ballad of Suicide"

Dorothy Parker "A Well Worn Story"
"A Well Worn Story"

Randall Jarell "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner "

The Virtual Antology Installment Five

e. e. cummings "Somewhere I have never traveled"
"somwhere I have never traveled"

W. H. Auden "Funeral Blues"
"Funeral Blues"

John Milton "On His Blindness"
"On His Blindness"

John Donne "The Flea"
"The Flea"

Edna St. Vincent Millay "Dirge without Music"
"Dirge Without Music"

Sharing of a failed Attempt

This is a variation on an earlier theme, yet even as I present it here it feels to be a qualified failure. The main action in the last line balances upon the word 'corpsing', which is when an actor breaks character and begins laughing. For those of you who remember, think Harvey Korman and Tim Conway on, "The Carol Burnette Show".



Death at a Social Function (an obligatory obituary)

Between St Vitus’ waltzes round the ward and a stolen glance at swollen glands,
I would have thought you passed on long ago. It pains me, though, as you lift a finger
to your lips as eavesdropping is your weakness and I it’s reluctant witness…

“Then, out of kindness, I gave her a plum and have not been rid of her since…”

“What was that slogan of the resurrectionists? ‘everybody needs some body’ wasn’t it?”

“…it was her sincerity that was vulgar. I had had delusions of slander on mind…”

“His insistence was that he was, “S-V-E-L-T-E” as if a thesaurus eliminated his convexity.”

“Should I then? Need I? Do I have to?”

“O’ no, I shouldn’t say this was the first: Death has been in my family for years,” then, but, for the roaring of the corpsing characters, it would have been silent as the dead…

is conjugate to the liminal (a poem)

…is conjugate to the liminal

Back then through Cathedral Stations; muster back through Candleford.
And the hours, the minutes that draw out each hour, absurd.
Exchange dustbin palliative for dulcet narrative;
populate by way of coulisse-whisperings and accordion-overheards, quietened,
shy of substance, yet, in their own fashion, heaven-tense- to a word.

Airstruck amidst dwindled fervor: we split Spring’s great green spokes.
One for one, we held the door and blessed the transom with formula,
with ceremony, with such mathematical precision as to be phenomena….
amphisbaena equations in low-ash , “it must consume its own smoke…”




-d w stojek

le baiser fantôme

THE VIRTUAL ANTHOLOGY -Installment four

Langston Hughes
"A Quiet Girl"

Sylvia Plath
"The Munich Mannequins"

Emily Dickinson
"A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"

William Butler Yeats
"The Second Coming"

and for our final entry of the week

Arthur Rimbaud
"Les Illuminations"