Current and Back Issues of The HyperTexts

Formal Poetry is our editor's attempt to define what formal poetry is, and isn't, and why it doesn't have to be fuddy-duddy-ish.

How are we doing? The HyperTexts is currently averaging around 44,000 page views per month. If you'd like to see our most popular poets and pages, please click here for a snapshot.

Richard Moore Tribute and Memorial: One of The HyperTexts' and America's best poets, Richard Moore, passed away on November 8, 2009. Please remember a fine writer the best way a writer can be remembered: by reading his poems and essays, which you can find by browsing our main index. To read what his contemporaries have to say about Richard Moore and his work, please click here: Richard Moore Tribute and Memorial.  If you have contributions they can be emailed to Mike Burch at mikerburch@gmail.com.

March 2010: This month our first new Spotlight poet is Timothy Murphy, who hunts in the Dakotas when he's not writing about hunting.

Don Thackrey spent his formative years on farms and ranches of the Nebraska Sandhills before modern conveniences, and much of his verse reflects that experience. He now lives in Dexter, Michigan, where he is retired from the University of Michigan. His verse has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies.

Peter Austin lives with his wife and three daughters in Toronto, Canada, where he teaches English at Seneca College. Over a hundred and fifty of his poems have been published, in magazines and anthologies in the USA (including The New Formalist, Contemporary Sonnet, The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, The Pennsylvania Review, The Barefoot Muse, 14 by 14, The Raintown Review, The Shit Creek Review, Lucid Rhythms, The Chimaera, Road not Taken and Trinacria), Canada and elsewhere. He was December ’08’s poet of the month at the Formalist Portal and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He also writes plays, and his musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows has enjoyed four productions, the most recent in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Lakshmi Seethapathi Iyer lives in Mumbai with her husband and teenage daughter. She started writing in her late thirties, a few months after her mother passed away. This is her first poetry publication, but not (we predict) her last.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with a new THT exclusive.

We have published a new essay by Mike Burch, Christian Mothers and the Cult of Hell: What the Hell Are They Doing to Their Own Children?

The Puritan National Conscience by Joe Salemi was written in response to Burch's essay.

Joe Salemi, Mike's Salami and the Christian Mother-Monster by Mike Burch was written in response to Salemi's essay.

February 2010: This month we're pleased to have a new addition to our Formal Poetry page, which we're also publishing as an essay in its own right: Regarding the Great Poetic Divide, by T. Merrill. We also have two related essays: This Is Not a Manifesto by Quincy R. Lehr and Aints, Saints and Formalist Plaints by Michael R. Burch. If you're interested in formal poetry and the "state of the art" of contemporary poetry, we think you'll find food for thought on these pages. And we've just added a fourth related essay, The Effete Fascist, also by Michael R. Burch.

Sarah Palin, Poet! is an important page about our latest, greatest American poet, who is reinvigorating the English language at tea parties across the nation. She is a Major Poet following in the footsteps of Yoda, Yogi Bear, Yogi Berra and George W. Bush. And don't you dare miss the epic clash of limericks between her dastardly archenemy, Mike Burch, and her knight-in-shining-armor, the eminent Dr. Joseph S. Salemi!

Dan Almagor has been described as a "giant of Israeli popular culture." He was commissioned by the Israeli government to write military songs, and his early work often celebrated "Israeli macho culture and military heroism." But he has become a stern critic of the deeply rooted racism he sees in Israeli society, not only against Palestinians, but against Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews. After the outbreak of the first intifada in late 1980s, he said, “I suddenly realised that we’re doing there the very things which, as I was told throughout my entire childhood, were done to us Jews.” After he read the poem we published at a rally in a 1989 rally, he received dozens of death threats and his car was set on fire.

Yakov Azriel was born in New York in 1950, and has lived in Israel since 1971. He has published three full-length books of poetry in the USA: Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis (2005), In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus (2008) and Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus (2009), all published by Time Being Books. Over 120 of his poems have been published in journals in the USA, the UK and Israel, and his poems have won twelve awards in international poetry competitions, as well as two fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Liz Barger's Letter from Gaza (Almost) is the account of what happened when an American peace activist (who happens to be a personal friend of ours) tried to enter Gaza bearing Christmas gifts for the suffering children of Gaza. Unfortunately, the governments of Israel, Egypt and the United States played Scrooge.

Louise Bogan has long been one of my favorite poets. I just added "After the Persian" to her page, and it's a poem you really should read, if you haven't before. If you have, it's well worth revisiting.—MRB

Jim Hayes was a featured poet in Light Quarterly in 2005 and won the Espy Prize for Light Verse in 2004. His work has appeared in First Things, Iambs & Trochees, Able Muse, Per Contra, The Chimera, The Susquehanna Quarterly, and many other print and online journals.

Iqbal Tamimi, THT's Editor in Exile, has contributed a new poem, "The striver's departure."

The work of James Wilk, a Denver physician, has appeared in Measure, Pearl, The Barefoot Muse, The Raintown Review and elsewhere.

I had a hard time finding credible lists of the all-time best poems online, so I decided to create my own: The Best Poems Ever.—MRB

We have three interesting features by and about a writer, Immanuel A. Michael, who claims to be the human incarnation of Michael the Archangel. He has made a number of predictions of things to come (death and destruction not among them), which readers may find of interest (or at least want to bookmark, just in case). He claims to be the bearer of the true gospel, in three simple verses, and he says it is the purpose of Michael, Wonderful and Glorious to declare The Gospel of Michael and to defeat the Devil by putting an end to what he calls the "Cult of Hell" with a small tract of his entitled The Poisonous Tomato. According to him (one assumes archangels know such things), sex is not evil, but a blessing, and the dogma of hell originated with evil-minded men, not the good God. He claims to be able to prove, using the Bible, that hell was never mentioned in the entire Old Testament, nor in the earliest Christian texts, nor in the book of Acts (the self-recorded history of the early Christian church). According to him, none of the following people in the Bible knew anything about hell: God, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, King David, Solomon, any of the Hebrew prophets, or any of the earliest Christian evangelists, including Peter, Stephen, Phillip and Paul. Finally and most shockingly, he claims to be able to prove that Jesus was mocking the pagan Greek vision of the afterlife in his parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. If he's right, earth's children are being condemned to a fictitious hell by their own parents, but the emotional and spiritual abuse they suffer is all too real, and is one of the greatest roadblocks in the path of man's continuing development.

In our continuing effort not to be just another run-of-the-mill literary journal, we have decided to amuse you at our own expense by publishing the early poems (okay, juvenilia) of THT editor Mike Burch. Readers can gain valuable insights into how not to become famous poets, by observing where Mike went wrong, time and time again, when he broke every law of Modernism and Post-Modernism. Did the powers-that-be decree that passion and sentimentalism were expressly forbidden? Our foolhardy young poet would have none of that! (No wonder he had to start his own poetry journal.) And we have a sneaky suspicion that he's still up to his old tricks . . . still churning out poems drowning in human emotion: the weepy sort disdained by every professor-poet on the planet. And get this: as if to prove he's beyond any hope of redemption, he has even shared a poem he wrote in response to that tear-jerker to end all tear-jerkers, The Boy in the Bubble (yes, the made-for-TV movie starring John Travolta). Talk about a train wreck! Click here, if you dare, to read his Early Poem Project, which contains poems from his first high school poetry project notebook.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with three new poems.

Ann Drysdale also remains in our Spotlight, with three new poems.

We have added a second poem by Leslie Mellichamp, "Towers," to our Poems for Haiti page.

We are shocked and chagrined to report Shocking News: Hatred of God in Haiti! The honor of God has been questioned: what can people possibly be thinking?

The Gods: an Update is our sincere attempt to help our readers pick the best possible gods to fawn over, bow down to,  and worship.

O, Terrible Angel is a series of poems written over a period of nearly twenty years by Mike Burch for his wife Beth.

The Heretical Poets is a a rundown of the great heretics and the great apologists of Christian orthodoxy. Is it possible that atheists like Housman and Shelley were in agreement with Dante and Milton, after all?

January 2010:  This month we have added a new page of Hiroshima Poetry, Prose and Art.

Haiti Poetry contains poems and prayers for our brothers and sisters in Haiti.

We also have a late-breaking new report: Shocking News: Hatred of God in Haiti! We are appalled to hear that the honor of God has been questioned: what can people possibly be thinking?

The Gods: an Update is our sincere attempt to help our readers pick the best possible gods to fawn over, bow down to,  and worship.

We have a new page of poetry, prose and art about The Trail of Tears and a related feature, Osama bin Laden and the Twin Terrors, which discusses the similarities between the situation of Sitting Bull and the Sioux, and that of the Palestinians today. What many Israelis, Americans and Englishmen seem unwilling to even consider is that Muslims have legitimate grievances against our governments, and understand what is actually happening far better than we do: an ongoing, steadily worsening Holocaust of the Palestinian people. Sitting Bull obviously had good cause to oppose the way his women and children had been treated by (according to them) "vastly more civilized" white "Christians." His people's land was being stolen, parcel by parcel, and because that land meant food and life, his people were facing extermination. The handwriting on the wall was all too painfully obvious and the lies of the "White Father" were merely for the benefit of citizens who either subscribed to ethnic cleansing and genocide, or who bought whatever the government was shilling―hook, line and sinker. But what happens when men are backed up against walls while suffering, dying women and children cry out to them for protection? Was 9-11 the modern version of the Battle of Bull Run?  The articles above question what Americans "knew" about Sitting Bull, and what we "know" about Muslims today.

Our first Spotlight poet this month is Alfred Dorn. Dr. Dorn has been absolutely essential to the preservation of an endangered species: English poetry in its more traditional forms. A former vice president of the Poetry Society of America, he is the Director of the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, which has sponsored international contests since 1980. His efforts on behalf of narrative and formal (metrical) poetry are well known and greatly appreciated among his peers. Dom is a poet, critic and art historian of note, having won more than seventy awards. Anthony Hecht tells us, "The poems of Alfred Dom seem to me vigorous, imaginative and original, graced with elegant formalities when the occasion warrants, manumitted and free when the spirit moves." We invite you to experience those elegant formalities by clicking on his hyperlinked name above.

O, Terrible Angel is a series of poems written over a period of nearly twenty years by Mike Burch for his wife Beth.

We continue to update our new page on Palestinian Poetry, Art and Photography. We will be updating this page on a regular basis, so please bookmark it and visit it often.

Iqbal Tamimi is THT's new Editor in Exile. She will be helping us acquire the rights to publish poetry by Palestinian poets and other poets who work in Arabic.

We are also pleased to feature, side-by-side, the work of brothers Anthony Hecht and Roger Hecht. Anthony Hecht won numerous awards for his writing, including the Prix de Rome, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The Hard Hours), the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal and the Tanning Prize. Roger Hecht was a leading light in the Expansive Poetry movement, and his work was published in leading journals such as Poetry, The Paris Review and The Kenyon Review.  

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was perhaps the preeminent Arab poet of his day. He was born in the Galilean village of Barweh, which was razed to the ground by Israelis during the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of 1948. Darwish lived in exile for more than twenty years, until he was allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1996. But even then he spoke as if his exile continued, since he did not consider the West Bank his homeland. A central theme in Darwish's poetry is watan or homeland. His poetry earned international acclamation and has been translated into 35 languages. 

Nahida Izzat is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee who has lived in exile for over forty years, after being forced to leave her homeland at the age of seven during the six-day war. 

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight.

Ann Drysdale also remains in our Spotlight, with two new poems with a Christmas bent.

Nakba is the pseudonym of a Palestinian American poet who speaks very bluntly, often vehemently, about the plight of his people, and what he considers the complicity of Jews and Americans in their increasing destitution.

We have also added e. e. cummings to our list of Featured Poets.

We finished the year on a real bang, logging the 202,000th hit on our main page since we began tracking main page hits a few years back. But according to Google Dynamics, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the pages we've managed to index so far (by no means all of them) are getting from 28,000 to 33,000 hits per month (and those figures seem to be rapidly climbing). Many of our pages rank number one with Google, or close to the top, including our pages for such popular search terms as "Holocaust poetry," "formal poetry," "epigrams," and most of our poets' names. The bottom line? If you're a poet and you want your best poems to be read by large numbers of readers, THT is a good place to showcase them. And if you have a few spare minutes to spend reading poetry and "things literary," Google seems to find THT highly relevant, and readers seem to agree. So we believe the prognosis for the future is good, and getting better all the time. As many THT poets and readers know, I never subscribed to all the gloom and doom over the situation of contemporary poetry. Years ago I learned that "poetry" was a top ten search term with Lycos (the Google of its day). More people were searching for poetry than for "football," "golf" and the names of most of the celebrity sex kittens. I put two and two together and decided people were simply getting their daily dose of poetry for free on the Internet, which made sense because much of the poetry being published in journals was mediocre fluff being written by poet/critics for other poet/critics. So I decided to publish poetry myself, not giving a damn about prevailing theories and fads. Anytime someone sent  me a poem that I liked, I published it, and whenever someone sent me a poem I didn't like, I didn't publish it. Rather than demanding "original" work (as if good poems somehow become "unoriginal" if they can be read elsewhere, in someone else's journal), I decided it made perfect sense to ask poets for their best work and showcase it permanently, rather than publish the "flavor of the month." So THT became an online anthology, and I think that was a good move for our poets and our readers. All in all, I'm very happy with what we've accomplished, so far. I want to especially thank Tom Merrill for his generous (i.e., unpaid) assistance over the last few years. Everything we do for poets and readers is free, which makes THT seem like a vehicle for dispensing grace. And I would like to thank all our poets and readers for helping make THT a popular place to publish and read poetry. Oh, and of course HAPPY NEW YEAR!—Mike Burch

December 2009: A. E. Stallings was one of the first "name" poets we published, and Google Dynamics has just confirmed that she remains one of our most popular poets, so we are pleased to re-spotlight her fine poetry.

X. J. (Joe) Kennedy is another highly popular THT, as revealed by Google Dynamics, so we're pleased as punch and tickled pink to spotlight his poetry for the second time.

Iqbal Tamimi is joining THT as our new Editor in Exile. She will be helping us acquire the rights to publish poetry by Palestinian poets and other poets who work in Arabic.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was perhaps the preeminent Arab poet of his day. He was born in the Galilean village of Barweh, which was razed to the ground by Israelis during the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of 1948. Like multitudes of Palestinians, Darwish became an exile because his ancestral village had been destroyed. The title of his first book, Wingless Sparrows, speaks volumes. And yet Darwish rejected anti-semitism, saying: "The accusation is that I hate Jews ... I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews." When Darwish joined the PLO in 1973, he was banned from Palestine. Still, he recognized the humanity of the Jews; some were his oppressors, other his lovers: "I will continue to humanise even the enemy ... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings." Darwish lived in exile for more than twenty years, until he was allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1996. But even then he spoke as if his exile continued, since he did not consider the West Bank his homeland. A central theme in Darwish's poetry is watan or homeland. His poetry earned international acclamation and has been translated into 35 languages.  By speaking eloquently for himself and his fellow Palestinians, Darwish made it impossible for history to ignore them: "We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history." Darwish became a voice of compassion and reason, speaking for young men driven to martyrdom by despair: "We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombings, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair ... We have to understand—not justify—what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven ... Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope—a political solution—they'll stop killing themselves." When it was suggested that Darwish's poems be taught in Israeli high schools, Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected the proposal, saying Israel was "not ready." This sounds suspiciously like white southerners saying their children were "not ready" for the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes.

We are also pleased to feature, side-by-side, the work of brothers Anthony Hecht and Roger Hecht. Anthony Hecht won numerous awards for his writing, including the Prix de Rome, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The Hard Hours), the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal and the Tanning Prize. Roger Hecht was a leading light in the Expansive Poetry movement, and his work was published in leading journals such as Poetry, The Paris Review and The Kenyon Review.  

Nahida Izzat is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee who has lived in exile for over forty years, after being forced to leave her homeland at the age of seven during the six-day war. She is a mathematician by profession but art is one of her favorite pastimes. She loves hand-made things and so makes dolls, cards, and most of her own clothes. She started writing around three years ago when her friends insisted she should write about her memories, experiences and feelings as a Palestinian. When she did it all came out sounding—she was told—like poetry! So she self-published two books: I Believe in Miracles and Palestine, The True Story.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with three new THT exclusives.

Ann Drysdale also remains in our Spotlight, with two new poems with a Christmas bent.

Nakba is the pseudonym of a Palestinian American poet who speaks very bluntly, and often vehemently, about the plight of his people, and what he considers the complicity of Jews and Americans in their increasing destitution.

We also have a new page of Heretical Christmas Poems, with contributions by Drysdale, Merrill and other poets.

We have also added e. e. cummings to our list of Featured Poets.

November 2009: Mark Allinson completed a Ph.D in 1989 in English literature, then taught for six years at Monash university in Melbourne, Australia. He also taught adult-education courses in literature, philosophy and religion. Since retiring from teaching Mark has been writing and publishing poetry and essays in magazines and journals both in print and on-line. Mark has recently published a chapbook of poems  and recently has had six poems in three poetry anthologies published by William Roetzheim.

Frank Osen’s work has appeared in publications like The Dark Horse, Pivot, Blue Unicorn, The Spectator and The Wallace Stevens Journal.  He was a runner-up for the 2008 Morton Marr Poetry award, won the 2008 Best American Poetry Series poem challenge, received the Lord Byron Award from The World Order Of Narrative & Formalist Poets, and was a finalist in the 2006 Nemerov sonnet competition.

David Rosenthal is our third new Spotlight poet this month. His poems have appeared in journals like Measure, The Formalist, Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, and Pivot. He has also published haiku and senryu in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Lilliput Review, Wisteria, and other journals. He has been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and a Pushcart Prize Nominee.

We've made a number of updates to the page of Greg Alan Brownderville, so he's back in the Spotlight for the month of November.

We have also updated Rose Kelleher's page, so she remains in the Spotlight.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with a new THT exclusive.

Ann Drysdale also remains in the Spotlight with three new poems.

October 2009: This month we've updated the poetry page of Zyskandar Jaimot with a new poem about the perplexities of submitting sex-saturated poems to The New Yorker. We have also published the poem, "Must Have SASE," in our Spotlight, where it now appears next to the essay "How I Blew It At The New Yorker" by Richard Moore. If you want to know how to be rejected or blacklisted by The New Yorker, why not take advice from the experts? Or, if you prefer to avoid the rat race, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy "More Distant Recollections of the NYer," a poem by T. Merrill about sitting back, relaxing, and reading the NYer.

Rose Kelleher is one helluva poet,
and we want you to know it.
(Don't you dare miss her charming villanelle
on the perilous charms of the Devil!)

Ann Drysdale remains in the Spotlight with two new poems.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, also remains in the Spotlight with four new THT exclusives.

We have also published the sixth installment of AFTER by Sharron Rose.

September 2009: Adrie Kusserow is a cultural anthropologist who works with Sudanese refugees in war-torn South Sudan. At St. Michael's College in Vermont she teaches courses on modern-day slavery, refugees and internally displaced people. She and her husband Robert Lair started the New Sudan Education Initiative. Their first girls' health sciences school will be built in Yei, South Sudan. The poems published by The HyperTexts are based on her visit to a Sudanese refugee camp in Uganda.

Greg Alan Brownderville tells us: "I was born and reared in a musical family of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, where I absorbed the blues, Southern gospel, country preaching saturated with the King James Bible, and the rural rhythms of life in the Mississippi River Delta. Rhythm ruled."

C. S. Fox earned her B. A. in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts and went on to obtain her M. S. in Education from Simmons College. She is a teacher and single mother to two young children, and maintains her sanity by reading and writing poetry, swimming and hiking.

Quincy R. Lehr. remains in the Spotlight, with a completely revamped page.

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi returns to the Spotlight, with a new poem, "Genesis."

We are pleased to be able to publish a new essay, How I Blew It At The New Yorker, by Richard Moore. If you want to know how to be blacklisted by The New Yorker for thirty years, be sure to take notes.

We have also published the fifth installment of AFTER by Sharron Rose.

Ann Drysdale also remains in the Spotlight with two new poems.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, also remains in the Spotlight with yet another THT exclusive.

August 2009: This month we're pleased to shine the Spotlight on Wendy Videlock, with two new poems and an updated photo.

Catherine Chandler is also in the Spotlight, with a number of new poems and an updated bio.

We've also completely revamped the page of Quincy R. Lehr.

We have a new Holocaust poem by an American poet, Edward Nudelman, whose grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.

The Glob Blog is a blog intended to keep you up to date with the latest escapades of the poets and editors of The HyperTexts, via letters, essays, rants, etc., on topics like the right of adults to euthanasia, the right of non-heterosexuals to copulate and marry as they please, and the right of Palestinian kindergartners not to be spat on and cursed by Israeli soldiers with raised machine guns.

Ann Drysdale remains in the Spotlight, with several new poems, including a fine translation of a French poem by Théophile Gautier.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with two new THT exclusives.

We have published our second installment on the subject of the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of the Palestinians: Parables of Zion.

We have also published the fourth installment of AFTER by Sharron Rose.

July 2009: This month, I'm breaking a long-established rule of my own making, by spotlighting my own poetry. I have a program I use to keep track of the pieces I've had published, and just before I began working on this issue, the program popped up 777, as if I'd hit the jackpot. With 777 publications under my belt, it seems safe to assume that someone somewhere might like my work, so for the very first time my poetry appears in the Spotlight, after which I will once again be relegated to my normal position in the ranks as THT's "Editor in Arrears." You can read my poetry page by clicking here: Michael R. Burch.

I have also written a hopefully provocative piece of prose called Independence Day Madness. Even if you hate my poetry and doubt the sanity of the editors who published me 777 times, this essay may cause your absurdity radar to start pinging, as you ponder whether Americans really believe in the American Creed of equal rights for all human beings outside our shores.

Maryann Corbett is the author of two chapbooks, Dissonance  and Gardening in a Time of War. She is a co-winner of the 2009 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, The Lyric, Candelabrum, First Things, Blue Unicorn, The Raintown Review, The Barefoot Muse, and other print and online journals. She has also served as the administrator of Eratosphere, a popular online forum for poets, especially those specializing in metrical verse.

Ann Drysdale remains in the Spotlight, with a new poem in her inimitable (and pleasingly naughty) style.

R. Nemo Hill asked us to keelhaul all his poems and, after they'd been deep-sixed, haul up new ones. You can view the results by clicking on his name.

Erin Hopson has never been published (until now) and has taken only a couple of poetry classes on her way to earning her Masters in Social Work. She currently works as an HIV case manager while living with her girlfriend, three cats, and two dogs.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with yet another THT exclusive: the most entertaining, enlightening poem I've ever read about "taking out the trash," which in this case is a double entendre.

We also continue to spotlight Richard Moore's latest and perhaps greatest essay, A Life.

We have also published the third installment of AFTER by Sharron Rose.

Colin Ward was born in 1954 in Brampton, Ontario and, after much wandering, has resided in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for the last thirty years. His work has appeared online in venues ranging from Beside the White Chickens to Autumn Sky Poetry and has been anthologized in David W. Mitchell's Talus and Scree. Colin says, "If you've heard of me you're reading too much poetry." We caution, "No comments from the Peanut Gallery!"

June 2009: This month we are pleased and honored to spotlight the poetry of Sandy VanDoren, a retired professional archivist who has been published in Measure, Iambs and Trochees, Pivot, Edge City Review, The Lyric, The Mid-American Poetry Review, Medicinal Purposes, and several other journals. She was the winner of The Lyric's Fluvanna Prize in 2007 and its Leslie Mellichamp Prize in 2008, was published in a book of poetry, Dialogues, in 2003, and has been the chairman of the trustees of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society. She is presently on the board of the West Chester University Poetry Center in Pennsylvania.

Mary E. Moore, our second Spotlight poet, earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Rutgers University, then an M.D. at Temple University’s School of Medicine. She went on to teach at Temple and the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where she headed the Division of Rheumatology. Dr. Moore only started to write poetry seriously after her retirement. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Light Quarterly,  Möbius, The Raintown Review, Verbatim, The Eclectic Muse, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and in several other journals and anthologies.

We have published the second installment of AFTER by Sharron Rose.

Ann Drysdale remains in the Spotlight, with two intriguing poems about her experiences with Robert Graves: one in real life as a flirtatious schoolgirl, the other in a dream from which she was "awakened to reality" in an unexpected way.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, remains in the Spotlight with yet another THT exclusive.

We have added "Cargoes" by John Masefield to our Masters page. 

Michael Stowers remains in the Spotlight.

May 2009: We continue to spotlight the poetry of Richard Moore. We have also added a footnote (one might call it a grace note) to Richard's latest essay, A Life.

We have added two poems about dreams by Langston Hughes and a visionary one by William Blake to our Masters page. 

Michael Stowers remains in the spotlight, with a new poem.

We also continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale, with two new poems of hers.

AFTER by Sharron Rose is a highly unusual book we'll be publishing in installments, so please be sure to check it out each month if you find it of interest.

We have also added a new poem to the poetry page of Usha Chandrasekharan.

T. Merrill also remains in the Spotlight with yet another THT exclusive.

And last but certainly not least, we have added a number of poems to the page of Seamus Cassidy, a retired Irish redhead.

April 2009: To celebrate April Fool's Day, we are spotlighting The Archpoet. Not much is known about him, except that he has the coolest name ever, wrote in medieval Latin circa 1165, and seems to have given the modern world one of its first glimpses of the "learned fool," the vagabond poet/rogue scholar.

Also, we've added three new poems to the poetry page of Richard Moore. Richard is a helluva poet: a poet who will be known to future generations if we have anything to say in the matter. Or even if we don't and good taste in poetry has anything to do with who gets read. A poem of Moore's that I particularly like is "In the Dark Season." The three lines below are an almost perfect description of the mysterious art of writing poetry:

One studied a new language in the darkness,
looked far down into the well,
into the hints of sunlight in its depths.

I'd encourage our readers to do what I have done myself: buy all of Richard's books, read his poems, study his essays. Get him to sign the books you buy, because according to Richard he's pissed off his share of publishers, which means his signature may be a rare and valuable commodity in the future.—MRB

We are pleased to be able to publish Richard's latest essay, A Life.

It has also been our distinct honor and privilege to publish Richard Moore's book-length poem The Mouse Whole in whole, not in part:

Here is where you enter, if you dare,
Richard Moore's MOUSE EPIC.
Beware
its 6,000 hilarious rhyming lines
about a mouse's struggle to escape
the sewer into which he was born,
forlorn,
and yet able to make
your jaw drop, agape:
The Mouse Whole
an epic poem
by Richard Moore

Michael Stowers remains in the spotlight, with two new poems.

We also continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale, with two new poems.

T. Merrill also remains in the Spotlight with yet two more THT exclusives.

We have added the letter-poems of Emily Dickinson to our "Blasts from the Past" series.

March 2009: This month we are pleased to spotlight the work of Michael Stowers for the first time, but hopefully not the last. As T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, says in his introduction, "Except for an early play, which was performed at the University of London (St. Mary's campus) and a few poems published by Jocundity, a paper vehicle based in NY, Michael has kept his literary inventory strictly under wraps." And so our readers may be among a select few to have read his work. We hope to not only publish more of his poems, but also some of his paintings, if he will allow us to do so, in the near future.

Usha Chandrasekharan graduated with a degree in Economics, having also taken a short-term course in Journalism and another shorter one in concept selling. She worked with a Kolkata, India information marketing company and later joined Scholastic India as an educational coordinator. Her education for the greater part has been consolidated "on the street." Communicating at all levels is her forte. Poetry and short stories are her pastime, although she says, "I am not prolific like most writers."

Amitabh Mitra is a medical doctor in a busy hospital in East London, South Africa. A widely published poet, artist and photographer both on the web and in print, he has been hailed as one of the most popular South African poets writing in English today. As one reviewer aptly put it, "his love poems with a backdrop of feudal Gwalior and Delhi take you on a sentimental journey to the old family homes, forts, palaces and places where he grew up." Come with us, as we ride a slow train to Gwalior with the good doctor.

Archana Rajagopalan is also new to our pages this month. Archana was born and resides in Chennai, India, where she works as a consultant.

Fred Hose lives in Pretoria, South Africa, where he is self-employed and does contract engineering work. He loves impressionistic paintings and writes novels, short stories, essays and poems. The story of how he came to be a writer is a remarkable one, so please visit his page, where we've allowed him to tell his story in his own words.

Max Babi was born in Cambay, or Khambhat, a city in central Gujarat, into an ex-royal family of Junagarh and Radhanpur. His mother tongue is Urdu, but by age twelve he had mastered English, being completely self-taught. His particular writing focus is on the transcreation of Urdu and Gujarati poems. A book is half ready, and several of his stories have been accepted by the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series. He also writes regularly for Pune Mirror, a part of the Times of India.

We have added new poems and artwork, courtesy of Mary Rae, to the tribute page of Kevin N. Roberts, the founder and first editor of Romantics Quarterly, who passed away recently.

We continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale, with new poems you would be amiss to miss.

T. Merrill also remains in the Spotlight with two more THT exclusives.

February 2009: This month we continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale, with three new poems you would be amiss to miss.

T. Merrill, our Poet in Residuum, also remains in the Spotlight with yet another THT exclusive.

Was Hart Crane the last major poet? Click on his name to hear what Tennessee Williams, Robert Lowell and Harold Bloom have to say. Since Crane was born on the cusp of the 20th century, in 1899, we'll hedge our bets by making him a "Blast from the Past" and a featured contemporary poet.

January 2009: This month we're publishing a tribute page for THT poet Kevin N. Roberts, the founder and first editor of Romantics Quarterly. Kevin died recently after struggling with a variety of physical maladies which either began or intensified when he swam to the aid of others through the contaminated waters of Hurricane Katrina. Kevin was a compassionate and courageous young man who accomplished much in his brief life, and we will do our best to publish more of his work as it becomes available to us. In addition to being a writer and artist, Kevin was a professor of English Literature. He spent three years in the English countryside of Suffolk, writing Romantic poetry and studying the Romantic Masters beside the North Sea. His work appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including Dreams of Decadence, Penny Dreadful, Songs of Innocence, The Oracle, The Storyteller, Tucumcari Literary Review, The Sentimentalist, Poet's Fantasy, and several others. He had two books published in the United Kingdom: Fatal Women, a collection of poetry and Quest for the Beloved, a book of literary criticism and philosophy. One of our favorite poems of his seems to presage the brevity of his life and his struggles with the "surf and sea foam on a foaming sea" . . .

Our time has passed on swift and careless feet,
With sighs and smiles and songs both sad and sweet.
Our perfect hours have grown and gone so fast,
And these are things we never can repeat.
Though we might plead and pray that it would last,
Our time has passed.

Like shreds of mist entangled in a tree,
Like surf and sea foam on a foaming sea,
Like all good things we know can never last,
Too soon we'll see the end of you and me.
Despite the days and realms that we amassed,
Our time has passed.

(No sooner had I finished this article and popped into Outlook to check my e-mail, than the message "Thanks Mate!" flashed up on my monitor. But when I tried to discover who had sent the e-mail, there was no email with those words. Very strange, in a nice, comforting way.—MRB)

We're pleased and proud to shine the Spotlight on Anna Evans. Anna is the new Editor-in-Chief of one of our favorite formal journals, The Raintown Review, so we asked her to give our readers a "vision statement" for the journal under her editorship. She agreed and you can read her vision statement on her poetry page, beneath her poems, or at the top of our Links page.

Sophie Hannah Jones is a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers have sold 200,000 copies in the UK, and are also being published or slated to be published in fourteen other countries, with several more foreign rights deals under negotiation. Sophie’s fifth collection of poetry, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T.S. Eliot Award, and in 2004 she won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK.

We continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale and we have added a new poem to the top of her page. Be sure not to miss it!

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight. Tom is our Poet in Residuum, a mysterious office for which he has created his own job title and duties. But since we admire his poetry, greatly appreciate (and need) his eagle eye, and don't pay him, we're more than happy to give him free rein.  Much of what our readers enjoy freely here is the result of Tom's inspiration, talent, craftsmanship and his dedication to the fairest Muse.

We continue to feature the latest installment in our Blasts from the Past series: a page of poems by, about and admired by Abraham Lincoln.

December 2008: This month our first new Spotlight poet is Paul Stevens, the founder and editor of two literary journals: the Shit Creek Review and The Chimaera. A transplanted Englishman, he now lives on the New South Wales coast with his wife and numerous children, dogs, trees and raucous birds.

We're also pleased to re-shine the THT Spotlight on the work of Joe M. Ruggier, a Maltese poet now living in Canada who has sold more than 20,000 books . . . most of them poetry books he sold door-to-door!

We continue to spotlight the poetry of Ann Drysdale and have added nearly a dozen new poems (er, poems new to us) to her page.

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight, with four new THT exclusives. And it's now official: Tom is our Poet in Residuum!

We have added a page of poems by, about and admired by Abraham Lincoln.

Last but certainly not least, we have a very interesting article, "A Direct Experience with Universal Love" by Sharron Rose, a poet/artist who had a mystical experience in Sitges, Spain on Christmas Eve 1984, and now lives in California with a cat who insists on sitting in her lap while she types on her computer.

November 2008: This month's first new Spotlight poet is Scott Standridge. Scott is yet another fine poet who hails from Arkansas. Jim Barnes, Greg Brownderville, Jack Butler and Sam Gwynn (who continues to be spotlighted this month) are other THT poets with Arkansas roots. Must be something in the water there, or perhaps it's the mayhaw jelly that gets the poetic juices flowing . . .

Our second new Spotlight poet is Ann Drysdale, who "was born near Manchester, raised in London, married in Birmingham, ran a smallholding and brought up three children on the North York Moors and now lives in South Wales." Among her literary accomplishments, she had the longest-running by-line column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Her fifth collection, Quaintness and Other Offenses, is scheduled for Spring 2009.

The THT Spotlight continues to shine on John Whitworth, who is, as his name implies, a worthy wit, and a wit well worth reading. 

Whitworth and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn are good friends and admirers of each other's poetry, and so we're pleased as punch to be able to re-re-spotlight Sam's work alongside John's. We have added twenty-two new poems to Sam's page, so please be sure to check it out.

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight, with yet more THT exclusives.

Mary Rae is once again in the Spotlight, as her book St. John of the Cross: Selected Poems, originally published in 1991, has recently been released in a long-awaited revised edition, which you can peruse and order by clicking here. Saint John of the Cross famously went through a "dark night of the soul" to emerge as one of the shining lights of mystical poetry.

October 2008: This month the THT Spotlight shines on John Whitworth, whose name seems prophetic because he is, indeed, a wit worth reading. Whitworth is one of those creatures rarer than unicorns: a contemporary poet who has actually made money from his compositions, although he is eager to make more, so please be sure to buy his books!

Whitworth and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn are good friends and admirers of each other's poetry, and so we're pleased as punch to be able to re-spotlight Sam's work alongside John's.

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight, with yet more THT exclusives.

September 2008: This month we're pleased to be able to shine the THT Spotlight on Arthur Mortensen, a much-published poet, and the webmaster of Expansive Poetry & Music Online.

The Archpoet is the latest poet in our Blasts from the Past series. Not much is known about him, except that he has the coolest name ever, wrote in medieval Latin circa 1165, and seems to have given the modern world one of its first glimpses of the vagabond poet/rogue scholar. He was also quite a heretic, which appeals to us immensely.

Last month we published the short story "Missionaries" by Sally Cook. This month we're back with poetry by Sally Cook, including her take on Newton, Adam, Eve and man's sinful, nay gluttonous!, lust for apples and knowledge. We just wonder which sort of apples, and whose, Adam was really after . . .

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi continues to be in the Spotlight, as we have added several selections from his "Gallery of Ethopaths" to his THT poetry page.

T. Merrill continues to remain in the Spotlight, with more THT exclusives.

We recently had over 10,000 hits on our main page for a single month, which is a new record for THT. It seems someone out there likes us, and we sincerely hope it's you.

August 2008: Joseph Salemi is back, with a second installment of A Gallery of Ethopaths, accompanied by more fine illustrations by Bob Fisk. Once again Salemi plays pugnacious Churchill to every other poet's Neville Chamberlain! Watch the Pit Bull of Poetry take on the Pompadoured Poodles of Poesy! BIFF! BAM! POW! There's more than one Dark Knight intent on saving the world from nefarious Jokers!

Speaking of Bob Fisk, we're pleased to be able to publish "Missionaries" by his wife, Sally Cook. Is "Missionaries" a work of fiction, non-fiction, or something in between? We'll never tell, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions. You can also find "Missionaries" features atop our Mysterious Ways page.

The Archpoet is the latest poet in our Blasts from the Past series. Not much is known about him, except that he has the coolest name ever, wrote in medieval Latin circa 1165, and seems to have given the modern world one of our first glimpses of the vagabond poet/rogue scholar.

And it's our distinct honor and privilege to publish Richard Moore's epic poem "The Mouse Whole" in whole, not in part. Along with the Mouse we invoke the Muses:

Fly in from your Ocean Isles
out in clear ethereal blue;
revive me with giggles and smiles,
and help me with rhyming too;
protect me from errors
and blunders
as I sail through these terrors
and wonders,
and preserve my powers undiminished
until this moustrosity's finished.

May 2008: This month we are pleased as tickled pink punch to be able to publish THT's Second Interview with Richard Moore.

New to the Spotlight this month is Ian Thornley's long poetic work, "Song of a Son of Light."

We are also delighted to be able to feature a second long poetic work, "Blue Beard," by V. Ulea.

T. Merrill continues to remain in the Spotlight, with two more THT exclusives.

April 2008: New to the Spotlight this month is Charles Martin, one of our foremost translators of Latin poetry and a fine poet in his own right. Martin has received the coveted Award for Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets. He has also been awarded the Bess Hokin Award by Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, not to mention having been nominated  for the Pulitzer Prize three times.

Our second new Spotlight poet is Seamus Cassidy, a poet who comes from a heritage of Irish storytellers.

This month we welcome Charles Adés Fishman back to the Spotlight, with two poems about his father that nicely complement his poems about his sister and grandson.

T. Merrill continues to provide us with THT exclusives, and so he remains in the Spotlight.

We have added a new article "Two Tales of the Night Sky" to our Mysterious Ways page. The article contains a short prose piece by Glory Sasikala Franklin and a poem by Harold McCurdy. Mysterious stuff indeed!

Our congratulations to THT poet Rhina Espaillat, who will be the first writer to receive the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award  from Salem State College. Bravo, Rhina!

We have just created a new page, Heresy Hearsay, which will be a forum where poets can freely speak their minds, using salty language or vulgarities if they so choose, on any topic, including things "heretical." We will take as the main planks of our platform two choice sayings:

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.—Walt Whitman

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.—Wallace Stevens

I once challenged poets to discuss the Big Topics of God, death, the afterlife, eternity and infinity. But now I would raise a more pressing earthly issue: freedom of speech. Do we really believe in it? Do poets practice it? Are we afraid to take on the organized gangs of fundamentalism that threaten daily, even hourly, to take away our treasured freedoms of speech and religion (or non-religion)? Will poets speak up for the oppressed today, as William Blake once spoke up for child chimneysweeps? Well, who is more oppressed in the United States than non-heterosexuals? So where are the thundering words of poets to match the pulpit's hellfire sermons against our oppressed brothers and sisters? Dare we write only about love affairs, flower gardens and tea parties, when the Pope and legions of Protestant pastors say that God considers human life sacred (although according to them he condemned us all to death over an apple), and therefore euthanasia is "not His will"? Yes, I will defend the right of religious-minded people to say whatever screwball things they believe, but it seems of utmost importance to me that poets who believe in such things speak forthrightly for tolerance, compassion and sanity. Do I want to suffer needlessly at the end of my life because Pat Robertson, while taking out time from calling down  asteroids to level communities who don't elect Creationist school boards, may somehow "channel" the "will" of God and decide that I am unfit to determine my own fate? Let God determine my eternal destiny, but if he chooses not to heal me in this life for his ever-inscrutable reasons, why should it take an act of the Supreme Court for me to end my own life, humanely?—Michael R. Burch

March 2008: It is our honor and pleasure to once again shine the THT Spotlight on the work of Dr. Joseph S. Salemi. We have just published two new sections from his A Gallery of Ethopaths, with accompanying illustrations by Bob Fisk. Joe and I are as different as night in day in many ways, but we agree on certain principles that—I'm sorry to say—other publishers of formal poetry seem to be overly shy about, or shying away from, or both. One principle is freedom of speech, which includes the right of mature poets to use mature words. Another principle is the poet's right—indeed his duty—to call a spade a spade, even in the realm of religion, which is all too often the opposite of heavenly. It seems to me that both publishers of poetry and poets themselves have become wishy-washy on the matter of religion. William Blake was no pantywaist when he called Jehovah "Nobodaddy," the "Accuser of the Brethren" and the "Strong Man of the World." As fundamentalists of all cloths turn the world into a battleground, seemingly intent on bringing about Armageddon in their own day, poets and publishers shouldn't be afraid to play Devil's Advocate. Let poets speak their minds freely, and let readers make up their minds freely. That's how freedom of speech should work. If poets and publishers of poetry fear offending readers, they commit the worst of all possible offenses: not having the courage to lift a pen, when millions of young men and women died to gain them that right. While I don't agree with Joe on every count, I'm glad to give him a forum where he can speak his mind and conscience freely.—Michael R. Burch

We've added two new poems by Jack Butler and so he returns to the THT Spotlight.

T. Merrill has provided us with more THT exclusives, and so he remains in the THT  Spotlight.

In conjunction with THT poet/artist/photographer Judy "Joy" Jones we are publishing a new page called The Holocaust of the Homeless. We dedicate it to Joy, and to all the homeless people of the world. I believe it was Auden who said "poetry makes nothing happen." But not so very long ago William Blake wrote very touching poems about little children working as chimneysweeps—risking life and limb at what amounted to slave labor—and soon there were no children working as chimneysweeps, or at the very least nowhere near as many as before and decidedly not out in the open. Moreover, thanks at least in part to writers like Blake and Dickens, child labor laws were enacted in England, the United States and other civilized countries, and as a result today our children are allowed to play and learn, as children should, rather than work their fingers to the bone before they're fully formed. No, things are not perfect, but they have improved. I believe Joy's poetry, art and photography will "make everything happen" for the homeless people she loves and for whom she pours out her heart. I remember reading somewhere that Blake saw angels everywhere around him. When I see Joy, I see a human angel. I'm pleased and honored to be able to work with her to make the world aware of The Holocaust of the Homeless. If you have poems, art or photographs that you'd like to submit to the cause, please feel free to send them to me (Mike Burch) at mburch@aocg.com.

Judy Jones recently had the opportunity to write poems and read them for The Gap, the mega-billion-dollar manufacturer, distributer and retailer of apparel. What happens when a saint encounters a conglomeration? We have four poems of hers to share that we believe you'll find illuminating. Be sure to read "recognition," the last poem in the series.

We are pleased to announce a tribute page for Brian Coleman, a young man who befriended a number of Holocaust survivors, including THT poet Yala Korwin, before suffering an untimely death at the age of nineteen. But Brian's thoughtfulness and kindness will not be forgotten, and THT is pleased to be able to help keep his memory alive.

We are delighted to be able to publish "I remember ..." an essay by Urmila Subbarao on the dangers and joys of intolerance and tolerance, respectively.

P. Bloodsworth was born in Columbus, Ohio in November of 1974, upon which she was immediately adopted and taken to be raised on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whereafter, other than a rumoured kinship to an Apache shaman known as Goyathlay, information on her background remains as elusive as her somewhat scattered writings, some of which you can read here by clicking her name.

Wallace Stevens is the latest poet in our "Blasts from the Past" series, but by no means the leastest!

February 2008: Judith Werner, our first Spotlight poet this month, lives in Brooklyn Heights and works as a grant writer for Habitat for Humanity. Previously Senior Editor for Rattapallax, she teaches a poetry workshop at Caring Community and has had poems published in many literary magazines and several anthologies. She has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship, The Lyric’s Best of Issue Prize and Honorable Mentions, the Ronald J. Kemski Prize, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

T. Merrill has provided us with yet a few more THT exclusives, "hot off the pen," and he remains in the THT  Spotlight.

Because Werner and Merrill are both fans of A. E. Housman, we have elected to spotlight Housman's work again this month in our "Blasts from the Past" series. Please be sure to check out Werner's "Post-Modern Glosa," a poem which incorporates lines by Housman.

By the way, it was Merrill who first recommended Werner's work to THT, and then put us in touch with her, so this issue of THT very much bears his stamp, and our approval.

January 2008: Our first Spotlight poet this month is Mary Rae, a widely published poet who was formerly editor of Romantics Quarterly, a literary journal founded by poet Kevin N. Roberts. A graduate of Boston University with a degree in Spanish Language and Literature, Mary Rae is also a composer, artist and translator. Her book, St. John of the Cross: Selected Poems, was published in 1991, and she is currently at work on a revised edition. Samples of her music, poetry, and art can be found at www.maryraemusic.com.

Returning to the Spotlight is T. Merrill, one of THT's most gifted poets. These poems are THT exclusives, so please be sure to check them out.

The latest edition to our Blasts from the Past series is Thomas Wyatt, with an introduction by Jeffery Woodward.

We've also added a page of the Selected Poems of A. E. Housman to our "Blasts from the Past" series. A. E. Housman and Tom Merrill stand opposed to the forces of mindless (or at the very least sometimes unthinking) orthodoxy; in the spirit of freedom and enlightenment, their voices deserve to be heard. As potential wars now face the United States on multiple fronts—Iraq, Afghanistan, possibly Iran, and now even the Democratic presidential candidates who stridently decry the hawkishness of the Bush administration sit all-to-calmly discussing invading Pakistan—it behooves us to consider what Housman had to say about war and the young men who die in them. And as the planet's population burgeons, it also behooves us to consider what Merrill has to say on the biblical edict to "be fruitful and multiply." The Bible condones animal sacrifice, slavery, the stoning of children and genocide. Today we gasp aghast when we hear of women being stoned for adultery in Muslim countries. And yet this is the ancient wisdom of our own ancestors, along with "be fruitful and multiply." If we no longer stone our children and women, having put such "wisdom" behind us, isn't it time to reconsider the "wisdom" of parents having children they can't afford to feed and educate?

We have added Laurel Johnson's book review of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust to THT's Essays & Assays page.

December 2007: This month our first Spotlight Poet is Bill Coyle, whose poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, the New Republic, and Poetry. He is a translator from the Swedish, and his versions of the poet Håkan Sandell have appeared in PN Review and Ars Interpres and are forthcoming in the anthology The Other Side of Landscape.

Our second Spotlight Poet this month is Tom Riley. Riley was born in 1958 and grew up in Western New York. He was educated at Hartwick College and at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches English literature and Classical languages in Napa, California, where he lives with his wife, Mary, a stepdaughter, three small children, his in-laws, and a timid Belgian shepherd. He exercises way too much for a man his age and enjoys the potation of whiskey, cursing his enemies, and shooting the bow. He is not well practiced in the art of smiling. He is, however, well practiced in the art of poetry.

Our third Spotlight Poet is Bruce Weigl. Weigl enlisted in the Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent four years in the service, serving in Vietnam from December 1967 to December 1968, where he received the Bronze Star. He has contributed various well-renowned poems for over 25 years. Many of his poems are inspired by the time he spent in the U.S. Army and Vietnam. In The Circle of Hanh he writes, "The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return ... the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror." In addition to writing his own poetry, Weigl translated poems of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers captured during war with Thanh T. Nguten of the Joiner Research Center. Weigl's first award was a prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1979. He has since received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. He was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 for Arts and Creative Writing. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his book of poems Song of Napalm.

We're pleased as punch to be able to publish a new poem, "A Slice of Life" by T. Merrill, which is based on an incident that occurred recently in Bucharest. Merrill's poem will undoubtedly make our male readers wince, in between grins and guffaws.

George Eliot is our newest "Blast from the Past." Like so many great poets and writers, she seems to have been light years ahead of her time. Esther Cameron, editor of The Deronda Review, a journal which takes its name from a novel Eliot novel, explains why ...

Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was the Poet Laureate of England, yet "his writing suffered the singular and ironic misfortune of winning broad public favor at the expense of understanding."

Our Holocaust Poetry pages now rank in the top ten with Google. If you haven't read the work of Miklós Radnóti, Wladyslaw Szlengel and the other Holocaust poets we've published, then as Mel Fisher said just before he discovered a gold-laden galleon's gleaming treasure, "Today is the day." Once again, we'd like to express our appreciation to Yala Korwin, Esther Cameron, Charles Adés Fishman, and the other fine poets and translators who have helped us assemble one of the finest collections of Holocaust Poetry, Art and Essays on the Internet.

The Deronda Review is the new name of the erstwhile Neovictorian/Cochlea, one of our favorite poetry journals. Edited by the lovely, multi-talented Esther Cameron, The Deronda Review will remain a veritable sun of poetic energy and light, and we encourage our visitors to visit the TDR website and to subscribe to the paper-and-ink journal, which has published work by a number of THT poets, including Zyskandar Jaimot, Richard Moore, Jennifer Reeser, Joe Ruggier, Joseph Salemi and Noah Hoffenberg. Mindy Aber Barad is TDR's co-editor for Israel.

We have added several new poems to Esther Cameron's poetry page. They're at the bottom, but please be sure to read the ones you haven't read lately, on your way down.

I have started a new, somewhat mystical page entitled Sandra Jane Burch: A Voice Beyond. Sandra Jane Burch is the name of the elder of my two sisters (I'm the oldest of three siblings); she inherited it from our aunt of the same name, who died in 1955, three years before I was born. Since my sister goes by Sandra, I will call our aunt of the same name Jane, in order to avoid confusion. Until very recently, all I knew about Jane was that she had died in a flood as a young girl. But recently I came across a folder containing her schoolwork and certain other of her personal effects, and to my surprise and delight I discovered that she was a poet, as I and my sisters are. In her folder I found two poems, which I will share before delving further into her story. I believe the first of the two poems is her original work. Jane died while in the fourth grade, and I think her poem is a very nice one for the age at which she wrote it, or for any age:

Cherrys are red;
Christmas is white,
Stars are yellow,
Snow is white.

To read the full story, a continuing work in process, please click here.

November 2007: This month we're pleased to shine the THT Spotlight on the poetry of George Held. Many of our readers will recognize his work from The Neovictorian/Cochlea, The New Formalist, Commonweal, and other journals of note. George has a wonderful personal touch on poetic portraits like "Elise" and "Honey," and one cannot help but be impressed with his ability to work Joe DiMaggio, Bill Gates, W. B. Yeats and Euterpe into a single poem ("Finding My Way").

Jeff Holt is a therapist in Denton, Texas whose poems have been published in William Baer’s Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, The Formalist, Measure, The Evansville Review, Pivot,  Iambs & Trochees, The Texas Review, Rattappallax, Cumberland Poetry Review, Sparrow, and elsewhere.

W. Riley Munday—Riley Munday to family and friends—was a native Mississippian and a graduate of Mississippi College and the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. He was a Baptist minister, humorist, after-dinner speaker, husband, father, grandfather, and published poet. His two long-play humor records, "Smile, Southern Style" and "Seventh Sense" both went into at least four pressings. His poetry chapbook The Beginning Tree was published in 1971.

Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the latest poet in our "Blasts from the Past" series, was the Poet Laureate of England, yet "his writing suffered the singular and ironic misfortune of winning broad public favor at the expense of understanding."

Our Holocaust Poetry pages now rank in the top ten with Google. If you haven't read the work of Miklós Radnóti, Wladyslaw Szlengel and the other Holocaust poets we've published, there's no time like today. Once again, we'd like to express our appreciation to Yala Korwin, Esther Cameron, Charles Adés Fishman, and the other fine poets who have helped us assemble one of the finest collections of Holocaust Poetry, Art and Essays on the Internet.

Please click here for a book review of Richard Moore's Buttoned Into History, reviewed by Eleanor Goodman.

September 2007: This month we have a special article, "Flying the Flag on 9-11" that was written by THT editor Mike Burch in response to an email invitation to fly the American on September 11th in order to remember and honor our fallen dead.

We have added a number of new poems to the page of T. Merrill, one of THT's ablest poets and greatest benefactors. These poems are THT "exclusives," for which we are grateful.

For the first time in some time, we've added new lyrics (these by Leonard Cohen) to our Rock Jukebox page.

A'isha Esha Rafeeq-Swan has worked extensively with HIV, substance abuse, homelessness and advocacy groups. Her causes also include the end to violence and racism, and the promotion of peace, love, well-being and unity for all. She has been published by Street Spirit and is the co-producer of The Bones of the Homeless Will Rise. We're pleased to be able to publish her tribute poem  "Ode to Judy Jones." Judy (Joy) Jones is an artist, photographer, poet, and storyteller with fascinating and sometimes out-and-out miraculous tales to tell of her work among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."

August 2007: T. Merrill is a gifted poet, painter and photographer who is a THT Spotlight Poet for the second time. He's been a frequent contributor to our "Blasts from the Past" series and has aided and abetted THT in more ways than we can possibly remember or hope to repay.

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi remains a Spotlight poet, and we've added three fine poems to his poetry page which were not there last month. He considers these poems among his best, and we agree. He also has the latest addition to our Essays & Assays page.

When I started THT's Mysterious Ways page, it never occurred to me that THT would be involved in creating miracles, not just reporting them. But when I finally began to pray prayers of compassion for others only three years ago, at the not-so-tender age of 46, suddenly mysterious things did begin to happen, especially when other poets and artists were involved. The latest blessing occurred when I was praying with for Helen Bar-Lev and Johnmichael Simon, both THT poets. Johnmichael was about to undergo major surgery and Helen had asked me to pray for specific things to go well with the surgery. I promised that I would, but I added that I always pray for miracles (on the principle that it never hurts to ask). In any case, Helen's account of what happened is on this page, along with a sketch of what she calls "Genie-Angels" and a touching poem she wrote about the event.

What makes this all the more mysterious is the fact that I have sitting in front of my desk (so that I can beam smiles at it frequently) a very similar photo that was taken on March 9, 2004. I had been praying for a poet who, at that time, we believed to be on his deathbed. For some reason I began praying for him to see "the Glory of the Lord," and I'm still not sure why those particular words came to me. At that time, I was quite deluded about the nature of the glory of the Lord, because I thought it was some type of fearsome Cosmic power rather than simply Divine Love, as I do now, but nevertheless something wonderful happened, which changed the lives of at least five people: myself, three poets and the artist/photographer who caught something extraordinary on film. In my framed Great White Light photo, two male poets are bending like human angels over the ailing poet. Seeming to come, not from behind or above them, but from within the circle formed by their bodies, is a pure white incandescent light. In the upper left- and right-hand corners of the photo are two golden objects which (I like to think) are the edges of the gates of heaven flung wide open. The photographer later told me that the room was dim, with only a single small wall light, and that the flash didn't seem to go off, but "fizzled." Imagine her surprise when the picture came out perfect, with the three men looking for all the world like angels. And two were indeed angels of mercy, for they had come to pay their respects that night. The woman who took the photo was truly an angel of mercy, watching over the bedridden poet when his family would not, and he could barely lift his hand to sign a Valentine's card, much less write a poem. That night changed my life, because I saw what prayers can do, and I seemed to leap and bound beyond religious dogma into a realm of compassion where dreams come true. One of the poets and the artist/photographer recently were married, and make a smashingly lovely couple. The other poet told me just a few nights ago that he keeps the Great White Light picture hanging by his fireplace. The poet we were praying for recovered, was able to leave the hospital, and resumed writing poetry. Of course such things are matters of faith, but even skeptics and critics of religion like Mark Twain have reported prophetic visions and moments of clairvoyance. It seems to me that we can touch each other in ways that go beyond the physical laws that govern the universe, and even if I'm mistaken, it never hurts to be compassionate, to encourage, and to be encouraged. [I haven't been able to get permission to publish the Great White Light photograph, because the distinguished poet is in his bedclothes and doesn't prefer to be paraded around the Internet in such attire. But two THT poets and a THT artist/photographer would back me up in court, I expect.]

I have a third "mysterious ways" work of art, which is personal in nature, and seemingly an answer to a personal vision. Perhaps I will be able to reveal its full meaning in time; I hope so. It's a photograph snapped by the Russian poet/photographer Vera Zubarev (aka V. Ulea) while she was vacationing in Rome. Vera said that she "knew" the photo was for me, and when I saw it, I was flabbergasted. I had recently adopted the Archangel Michael as my person hero, after reading how he's renowned for offering all men mercy on their deathbeds, and for always being the advocate of man through all his many millennia of suffering, and for being "Wonderful and Glorious" in a warm-hearted way, without being arrogant (although I understand he's a bit vain about his wings). Before I "retired" to my current position as poet-editor (although I still have my day job at the software company I own and manage), playing pool was my pastime and obsession, and in Vera's photo the Roman Angel looks exactly as if it's readying a pool cue to "shoot at the stars," which is the way I feel about my prayers. It's mysterious indeed to look around my office and see beautiful works of art that seem to be the direct result of prayer. If we put religious dogma aside and touch the heart of Divine Love by uniting in compassionate prayers with and for each other, we may yet make the world a better, more mysterious place (especially if God doesn't have to bow out because one person is praying for another person's downfall).—Michael R. Burch

And speaking of things mysterious, we're pleased to once again Spotlight the lovely, alluring work of homeless advocate Judy (Joy) Jones. Judy Jones is an artist, photographer, poet, and storyteller with fascinating and sometimes out-and-out miraculous tales to tell of her work among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."  In her own words, "Each of my paintings has a story. Since I haven't an immediate family, the whole world has become my home and every person I paint becomes my 'brother, father, sister, mother'. I become intimately involved with the person before me. I started painting for the first time at the age of 33 from the confines of a hospital bed after a near death experience. The moment my paintbrushes touched the paper I knew my only purpose on the earth was to paint. Painting is my way to say I love you."

July 2007: "The Totems of Poetry" by Dr. Joseph S. Salemi is the latest addition to our Essays & Assays page. Dr Salemi is also our Spotlight poet for the month of July.

The latest poet in our "Blast from the Past" series is Thomas Campion (1567-1620). His page features an introduction by Jeffrey Woodward.

Johnmichael Simon started writing poetry seriously as retirement age arrived, after meeting his life partner, Helen Bar-Lev, an artist who is also a THT poet. Together they have collaborated on three published books, and Johnmichael has won or placed highly in a number of poetry contests, including a first and a third prize in an international competition, the Reuben Rose. He has also been published widely in anthologies and internet publications.

June 2007: Christina Pacosz, our latest Spotlight Poet, has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for nearly half a century and has several books of poetry, the most recent, Greatest Hits, 1975-2001 (Pudding House, 2002). Her work has appeared recently in I-70 Review, Jane’s Stories III, Women Writing Across Boundaries and a poem has been accepted for publication on-line by Pemmican.

Louise Bogan is the latest poet in our "Blasts from the Past" series. Bogan has long been one of my favorite poets, and it's a shame and travesty that she isn't better known than she is today. On the brighter side, we hope to soon have an excellent essay by Jeffrey Woodward on Bogan's poem "The Mark," so please re-visit her page when time allow.—MRB

Speaking of Jeffrey Woodward, we're pleased to be able to hyperlink to his essay on Amy Clampitt published by Umbrella. This essay also appears on THT's Essays & Assays page.

Woodward has also created a valuable resource for poets entitled "An Annotated Checklist of English Versification," which appears on The Barefoot Muse. 

Gordon Ramel is a scientist who has "come to poetry as a scientist." His university degrees are in ecology. He won a first poetry prize at the age of 14, but didn't really find "time to water the seeds of creativity" until he was 43. His poem "Darkness" is based on what might be called a "waking vision," and it seems prophetic both in its origin and in its message.

May 2007: Ezra Pound is the subject of the latest installment of our "Blasts from the Past" series, and his page kicks off with an introduction by T. Merrill, a frequent THT contributor.

Our first Spotlight poet this month, Janet Kenny, left a good life as a painter and singer in New Zealand to sing professionally in England then escaped to Sydney, Australia. There she was active in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement and jointly wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry. She now lives by the sea in Queensland. She has published essays and poems in print and many online journals including Mi Poesias, The New Formalist, Avatar, The Susquehanna Quarterly, The Raintown Review, and Iambs & Trochees. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is included in the international anthology The Book of Hope. She shares a book of bird poems, Passing Through, with the American poet Jerry H. Jenkins. She has illustrated a book of humorous poems, The Bad Habits of Little Boys, by the Irish poet Jim Hayes.

Debbie Amirault Camelin, our second Spotlight poet, lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband and three children. She is an eight generation Acadian with roots in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her poem "Intimidation," the winning poem in the 2006 Tom Howard Poetry Contest, was inspired by a real-life event on a journey through South Africa in 2001.

Leland Jamieson, our third Spotlight poet for May, lives and writes in East Hampton, Connecticut. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNC at Chapel Hill. Although he has been a scribbler of verse since he was a teen, starting in 2002 he began to devote himself to formal poetry. His goal is to tell stories and present vignettes relevant to today’s readers. "Teaching myself to write in rhyme and meter, and committing myself to that endeavor," he says, "has been the most liberating experience I have ever enjoyed in my writing life. What rhyme and meter most liberated for me was feeling, and with it fresh insight into people (including myself), and into the nature of the world we call home."

April 2007: Maureen Cannon died at her home in Wyckoff, N.J. in January 2007.  She had published over one thousand poems, most of which were written "in under a minute." We are pleased to be able to publish a number of poems by Maureen Cannon, provided to us by Light Quarterly editor John Mella.

Sheema Kalbasi is an award-winning Iranian-born poet, a human rights activist, a literary translator, the Director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry in Translation, the Director of Poetry of the Iranian Women Project, and a passionate and outspoken defender of ethnic and religious minority rights. She writes of love, loss, exile, and brave women who protect their children and defuse hate through their very existence. Kalbasi lives in the U.S. now, but honors her Iranian heritage.

March 2007: This month we're pleased to feature C. L. (Cynthia) Toups as a new Spotlight Poet. Toups is a self-employed editor and technical writer with a B.A. in History from Loyola University New Orleans. Her love of history and music fuels her poetic themes along with her south Louisiana roots.

Our second new Spotlight Poet is David Leightty, whose second chapbook, Civility at the Flood Wall was published in 2002; his first, Cumbered Shapes, was published in 1998. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Blue Unicorn, The Cumberland Poetry Review; The Epigrammatist, Light, The Lyric, Phase and Cycle, Riverrun, Slant, Sparrow, Spoon River Anthology, SPSM&H, and The New Compass.  In 2003 Leightty founded Scienter Press (www.scienterpress.org), a small poetry press.

Our third new Spotlight Poet is Helen Bar-Lev. Since 1976 Helen has devoted herself to art: painting, teaching and writing poetry. From 1989 until 2001 she was a member of the Safad Artists’ Colony in the Upper Galilee where she had her own gallery. Today she paints and teaches in Jerusalem. To date Bar-Lev has participated in 80 exhibitions, including 30 one-person shows. Her poems and paintings have appeared in many online journals such as The Other Voices International Project, The Coffee Press Journal, Boheme Magazine, The Poetry Bridge, River Bones Press and also in print anthologies such as Meeting of the Minds Journal, Voices Israel Anthologies, Manifold Magazine of New Poetry, Lucidity Poetry Journal and others.  She is the global correspondent in Israel for the Poetry Bridge and Editor-in-Chief of the Voices Israel annual Anthology.

Our fourth new Spotlight Poet is Yelena Dubrovina, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia where she received her Master Degree in Library Science. She left Russia in 1978, and since 1979 she has resided in Philadelphia. Yelena is the author of two books of poetry, “Preludes to the Rain” and “Beyond the Line of No Return,” and of many literary essays. In addition, she co-authored a novel “In Search of Van Dyck” with Dr. Hilary Koprowski. From 1983 to 1991, she was on the editorial board of the poetry and art almanac Vstrechi/Encounters.

Our fifth new Spotlight Poet is Jeffrey Woodward, whose poems and articles have been published widely in North America, Europe and Asia in various periodicals, including Acumen (England), Blue Unicorn, Candelabrum (England), The Christian Century, Connecticut River Review, Envoi (Wales),  Gryphon, Haiku Scotland, Hrafnhoh (Wales), International Poetry Review, Invisible City, Lines Review (Scotland), The Lyric, Nebo, Piedmont Literary Review, Plains Poetry Journal, Poem, Re: Arts & Letters, Second Coming, South Coast Poetry Journal, Staple (England), Studio (Australia), and many others.

We've added a new poem, "A Child of the Millennium," by Charles Adés Fishman that we like so much we've added it to three pages: Fishman's poetry page, which you can reach by clicking here, and our For Darfur and In Peace's Arms (Not War's) pages, which we are continually updating (and which we hope you'll visit often).

We have also added "Who knows one?" by Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, "Displaced Persons Camp in Darfur" by Yala Korwin,  and "What for Darfur?" by Ed Miller to the For Darfur page.

And we've added a fine new poem, "Unwithered," to the poetry page of T. Merrill.

We are pleased to announce that the complete work of Nadia Anjuman (Nadja Anjoman) is now available in Farsi at: www.entesharate-iran.com.

February 2007: W. H. (William Henry) Davies is the fourth installment in our "Blasts from the Past" series, and his page kicks off with an introduction by Davies admirer T. Merrill, a frequent THT contributor. Davies came from a poor family, didn’t go to college, was "tossed out of school at an early age for having organized a little gang of school acquaintances for the purpose of robbing local businesses,"  and ended up becoming a hobo, a career that ended when he attempted to jump a train, fell, and lost a foot under the train’s wheels. This unfortunate accident (for Davies) became a fortuitous incident (for the world), as Davies went on to become a writer of considerable distinction, publishing more than twenty volumes of poetry and several prose works, most notably The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908).

Our fifth installment of "Blasts from the Past," once again with an introduction by T. Merrill, is Conrad Aiken, one of the sweetest singers among American poets.

Mary E. Moore, our third Spotlight poet this month, earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Rutgers University, then an M.D. at Temple University’s School of Medicine. She went on to teach at Temple and the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where she headed the Division of Rheumatology. Dr. Moore only started to write poetry seriously after her retirement. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Möbius, Raintown Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and in several other journals and anthologies.

We're pleased as tickled pink punch to announce that T. S. Kerrigan now appears on Wikipedia. A well-deserved honor for a fine gentleman and one of THT's favorite contemporary poets.

We have added new poems to our For Darfur page, including one by THT poet Zyskandar Jaimot, and we continue to welcome submissions.

January 2007: Thanks to T. Merrill, we're bringing in the New Year with a bang with the poetry of Harold Monro, in our third installment of "Blasts from the Past." As Merrill tells us in his introduction, "T. S. Eliot singled out Monro as one of the two poets 'of a somewhat older generation than mine' whose poetry was closer to being 'the real right thing.' (The other was Yeats.)  In summing up his high opinion of Monro, Eliot predicted that his poetry would '... remain because, like every other good poet, he has not simply done something better than anyone else, but done something that no one else has done at all.' Which brings to mind a question: who today has heard of Harold Monro?" Well, at least you have now, if not before!

We're please to shine the THT spotlight on a number of new poems we've just added to the poetry page of Michael Cantor.

Melanie Houle was the first featured poet in The Raintown Review, and now she's a THT spotlight poet. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Lyric,  Texas Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Iconoclast, Timber Creek Review, The Rockford Review, The Aurorean, Mobius, and Pearl.

Nelson Mandela is an eloquent spokesman for Africa and for all humanity, and he is someone who not only "talks the talk" but definitively "walks the walk." Mandela's page close with a tribute in which Mohammed Ali explains why Mandela is his personal hero. 

Joseph McDonough, the latest addition to our Holocaust index, is a stockbroker who lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Having worked in the World Trade Center prior to 9-11, he began writing as a way to disconnect from this monumental tragedy. He soon began writing poetry of "witness," as a way to memorialize victims of terrorism and holocausts. He has been published in several literary journals, most recently The Penwood Review, and he will be a featured poet in the January 2007 issues of Poetry Life and Times (England) and Stylus Poetry Journal (Australia).

December 2006: This month, just in time to usher in the holiday season, we're pleased to be able to spotlight the work of Mary Malone, thanks to the efforts of her good friend and advocate, T. Merrill, who has written a touching and amusing introduction for her THT poetry page.

And we're pleased to be able to shine the THT spotlight for a second time on Annie Finch, who is well known, and rightly so, in formal circles. In addition to adding some new "Annie Finch originals," we have also added three of her translations: two of the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé, and one of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, which she co-translated with George Kline.

T. Merrill has also helped us kick off our new "Blasts from the Past" section by compiling some of the best lesser-known poems of one of the great ascended masters of poetry: A. E. Housman.

We have added a new poem of Thanksgiving to the poetry page of Takashi “Thomas” Tanemori, and we have also added this poem, appropriately enough, to our Thanksgiving page.

If you're a writer of poetry or prose, please note THT's calls for submissions for our For Darfur and In Peace's Arms (Not War's) pages, in the second paragraph at the top of this page.

November 2006: This month we re-welcome T. S. Kerrigan back to the THT Spotlight. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart by one of our favorite journals, The Raintown Review, for his poem "The Dust of Stars." With the sheer audacity of a true poet, Kerrigan, after agreeing to allow us to publish "The Dust of Stars," submitted a version of the poem that bore only a faint resemblance to the Pushcart-nominated poem! We tip our hats to him, and to the poem.

Marly Youmans is the second returning poet in the Spotlight this month, and we've added three new poems to her page that you won't want to miss. Her poems sometimes sparkle as though touched with a magic wand, bringing us close to the Otherworld, so prepare to be enchanted!

This month's first new Spotlight poet is Eve Anthony Hanninen. Eve’s work has appeared or will appear in Mannequin Envy, Southern Hum, Nisqually Delta Review, ForPoetry, The Reality Box, Red Letter Press, and elsewhere. She edits The Centrifugal Eye, an online poetry journal.

Our second Spotlight poet is Martin Itzkowitz, who teaches in the Department of Writing Arts at Rowan University. He has served as non-fiction editor and executive editor of Asphodel, a literary journal associated with the department's graduate program. Having begun writing poetry shortly after the Flood, Martin has published in various venues, most recently in The Lyric and Moment.

Robin Ouzman Hislop, our third Spotlight poet, was born in the United Kingdom and has also lived in Scotland, Scandinavia, The East and Spain. He now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. His work has appeared in  Dawn Millennium Anthology and Crystal Dawn Anthology published by Kedco Studios. His anthology After the Cave the Comet appeared in 2004. He started as a resident poet with Poetry Life & Times in January 2005 and took over its editorship together with Spanish poetess Amparo Arrospide from Sara Russell in May 2006.

We have also added two new poems—the first dedicated to Primo Levy, the second a plea for Israel to be "merciful, but strong"—to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

As many THT readers are aware, THT has been actively "taking sides" in the confrontations between the United States and Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. We're taking the side of brotherhood and peace, as our In Peace's Arms page attests. Recently, Dr. Mahnaz Badihian was kind enough to translate THT editor Michael R. Burch's poem "Brother Iran" into Farsi. If you'd like to see what a formal English poem looks like in Farsi, just click the hyperlinked title of the poem.

Call for submissions: Neil Harding McAlister is looking for rhyming, metrical poetry for a forthcoming collection of poems for children, ages 8 to 13. Detailed submission guidelines are found at: www.durham.net/~neilmac/children.htm.

October 2006: This month's Spotlight poet, Alfred Nicol, is the latest (but probably not the last and certainly not the least) of the Powow River Poets to be published by THT. Nichol edited the Powow River Anthology, published by Ocean Publishers in 2006, and was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light, published by The University of Evansville Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Formalist, Measure, Commonweal, The New England Review, and other journals. Several of his poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Poetry of New England and in Kiss and Part. The fourth of nine installments of his long poem, “Persnickety Ichabod’s Rhyming Diary” appeared in Light Quarterly.

September 2006: This month's Spotlight Poet is Jack Foley. His poetry books include Letters/Lights—Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Exiles, Adrift (nominated for a BABRA Award), and Greatest Hits 1974-2003 (published by Pudding House Press, a by-invitation-only series). His critical books include the companion volumes, O Powerful Western Star (winner of the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000) and Foley’s Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals. His radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. on Berkeley, California station KPFA and is available at the KPFA web site. His column, “Foley’s Books,” appears in the online magazine The Alsop Review.

While our focus has almost always been on contemporary poets, other than on our Masters page and other topical pages, we are always ready to make an exception whenever an exception is merited. This month we are making such an exception by publishing the lyrics of John Dowland, famed throughout Europe as "the English Orpheus" for his artistry and skill as the greatest lutenist of his day (1563-1626).

Mary Cresswell lives in New Zealand, where she is a self-employed technical writer and editor. She has been published in Light Quarterly, Tucumcari Literary Review, Landfall, Glottis, Tamba, and elsewhere.

We are also pleased to be able to add three new poems to the poetry page of Terese Coe. 

August 2006: David Alpaugh’s poetry, fiction, drama and criticism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Exquisite Corpse, The Formalist, Modern Drama, Poetry, Twentieth Century Literature, The Literature of Work, and California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present. His collection Counterpoint won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and his chapbooks have been published by Coracle Books and Pudding House Publications. Alpaugh operates Small Poetry Press, a chapbook design and printing service, and edits its Select Poets Series.  He is well known in poetry circles for his controversial thesis of The Professionalization of Poetry, which he defended at the AWP 2004 Convention in Chicago.

James Bobrick is also featured this month, and we'll let him describe his early poethood in his own illuminative words: "Though from the Northeast I was sent to a boarding school in Southern California. I was an indifferent student but was determined to pass the sophomore English final, which would consist entirely of quotes from Palgrave's The Golden Treasury. So on a flawless spring night I stayed up till dawn, increasingly enraptured, reading poem after poem. During that night my life changed. I knew—whatever else I did—that I had to write poems and have persisted ever since." His work has appeared in many magazines here and abroad, including Candelabrum, The Cumberland Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Slant, and The Worcester Review.

Ralph O. Cunningham has published three books: Lovesongs and Others by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, and No Continuing City and Mirrors of Memory by Multicultural Books.

July 2006: It's always a pleasure when we have new, never-before-seen-in-English translations by Yala Korwin, but these translations are indeed special—the only two remaining poems of her father, Salomon N. Meisels, who died at the hands of Hitler's thugs, and yet through these two utterly lovely poems lives eternally and shines all the more brightly. These, in my opinion, are poems worth of Rumi and Hafiz, i.e., immortal works.—MRB

Bronislawa Wajs, also known as Papusza, the Romani word for "doll", was an unusual child, even for a Gypsy child. She learned how to read and write by stealing chickens from Polish villages! To learn how she pullet-ed this off, and why she had to, just clicking her hyperlinked name (or nickname).

Daniel Waters was born in New Jersey, grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, earned his B.A. from Wesleyan
University, and has been a jack-of-many-trades ever since. His poetry has been a long-running staple of the Vineyard Gazette, has appeared monthly in Yankee magazine for the last decade, and can be heard daily on WCAI, the Cape and Islands' NPR station. His collection "Needing Winter" was the 2005 winner of the Westmeadow Press Chapbook Contest, and his sonnet "Jellyfish" won first prize in the 2006 Newburyport Art Association Poetry Contest.

Andrey Kneller was born in Moscow, Russia. At the age of ten, his family moved to start a new life in America, where Kneller was quickly able to learn English. Kneller first began to write poetry when he was thirteen years old, and has since written hundreds of poems. He has also translated poetry by Aleksander Pushkin, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Vysotsky, and other Russian poets.

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Views on  Poetry and War consists of two illuminating excerpts from the book Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson.

"Are Women Underrepresented in the Small Press?" a dueling essay by Charles P. Ries and Ellaraine Lockie is an interesting back-and-forth question-and-answer debate about the problem, if it exists, of women being less published than men by the small presses.

June 2006: Jerzy Ficowski, the friend of Jews and Gypsies, died at the age of 82 on May 9, 2006 in Warsaw, Poland. According to an obituary, his only novel, Waiting for the Dog to Sleep, recently found its way into the English language. The copies arrived at Ficowski's house just two weeks before his death. Having witnessed the genocide of the Gypsies during WWII, Ficowski became one of their few translators. And if not for Ficowski, the work of Bruno Schulz, the great Polish Jewish writer, would have been lost. In honor of an extraordinary gentleman, we are pleased to be able to publish English translations of five of his poems, including a never-before-seen poem, "A Prayer to the Holy Louse."

Miklós Radnóti is considered one of the foremost 20th-century Hungarian poets. He was born in Budapest into a Jewish family in 1909. In 1944 he was deported to a compulsory labor camp at a copper mine near Bor, Yugoslavia. As the Russian army approached, the concentration camps in Yugoslavia were evacuated and Radnóti and 3,200 of his fellow internees were led on a forced march through Yugoslavia and Hungary. He was shot to death in November near the West Hungarian village of Abda, along with 21 other prisoners who, like Radnóti, were too weak to walk. The mass grave in which they were buried was exhumed after the war and Radnóti's last poems, describing incidents of the march, were found in his trench coat pocket. Radnóti's posthumous collection, Tajtékos ég (Clouded Sky) contains odes to his wife, letters, and poetic fragments. "He framed poetic innovation in the pattern of the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. Essentially, the more chaotic and barbaric the age [became], the tighter and more refined became his poems' designs. Some poems, cast in ancient meters, ring with prophetic power. Others, in delicate invented forms, create the most exquisite crystalline tones. They produce magic, conjuring up the unprecedented without becoming obscure."—Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

Harold Grier McCurdy remains a THT featured poet for the month of June. Thanks to the continuing efforts of T. Merrill, who month after month has generously aided and abetted our efforts to find contemporary poetry of a high order, we have been able to add several new poems to McCurdy's page.

Our newest endeavor, In Peace's Arms, is now in full swing. The purpose of this page is to encourage the world to seek peace's arms, not war's. Your contributions to, and suggestions for, this page will be greatly appreciated. Please email them to Mike Burch. And please visit this page often, as we will be updating it on a regular basis. We will also be working with a small team of Iranian, Afghani and (hopefully) Iraqi poets and translators to find and publish the best work available to us. But poetry from all over the world is welcome, as long as it conveys wisdom and has the ability to bless.—MRB

May 2006: We are pleased to kick off a new artistic endeavor this month: In Peace's Arms. The purpose of this page is to encourage the world to seek peace's arms, not war's. The way we will encourage the world to do this is, of course, through poetry, literature and art. Your contributions to, and suggestions for, this page will be greatly appreciated. Please email them to Mike Burch. And please visit this page often, as we will be updating it on a regular basis. We are particularly interested in translations of Iranian poetry, and will be working with a small team of Iranian translators to find and publish the best Iranian work available to us.—MRB

This month's featured poet, Eunice de Chazeau, may be one of the wonders of the literary world that you haven't heard of, unless you're a longtime subscriber to The Lyric or similar journals. Thanks to the efforts of T. Merrill, we're pleased to be able to introduce, or re-introduce, our readers to a contemporary poet of considerable merit.

Richard Vallance is a poet, translator, editor and publisher who is well know in formal and haiku circles for his passion, exuberance, energy and outright damn hard work on behalf of poetry. Like Esther Cameron and Joe Ruggier (and THT's editor when he's not slacking off or catnapping), Richard Vallance is a poet who wears many hats and makes things happen. It's a pleasure and an honor to welcome him and his poetry to THT's pages.

Another poet's pseudonym, Noam D. Plum has himself placed work in several publications, most frequently Light Quarterly. He recently won $500 from The Country Mouse, making him a much more successful breadwinner than the poet for whom he fronts! (Which makes us wonder who his wife would pick, if push came to shove.)

Harold Grier McCurdy, was the Kenan Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. McCurdy was an inspiring teacher and a published poet. He authored basic textbooks in the area of personality. Early in his career at UNC-CH he carried out a series of detailed, statistical analyses on the texts of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser in an effort to resolve several puzzling issues of authorship involving these two poets. His data led him to conclude that these works were in fact the product of two different writers. Following up on these analyses, McCurdy carried out a more extensive investigation of the personality of Shakespeare that was published by Yale University Press in 1953. This work was followed by similar studies of D. H. Lawrence through his fiction and by extensive statistical analyses of the various characters appearing in the writings of two of the Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte. Professor McCurdy retired from the faculty of UNC-CH in 1971 but continued writing poetry and an occasional article for the New Yorker. He died at his home in Chapel Hill in November, 1999, and is greatly missed by his many admirers.

Mahnaz Badihian is an Iranian poet and translator with a passion and talent for English poetry.

We're pleased to announce that T. S. Kerrigan's new book The Shadow Sonnets and other poems is available from Scienter Press and can be ordered at www.scienterpress.org.

April 2006: Jack Butler is a THT featured poet for a second time.  He says of himself, "I am a noise-scarred singer, but by god I still hold the true note." That's no idle boast: his poetry will add multiple exclamation marks to anything anyone might say about him or his work. Jack Butler is simply one of the best poets writing today, and if you haven't read "For Her Surgery" or "Electricity" before, you have missed out, until now.  Get back into the loop of poetry sparking like a live wire by clicking here.

Rose Kelleher is one helluva poet,
and we want you to know it.
(Don't dare miss her villanelle
on the perilous charms of the Devil!)

Agnes Wathall is a poet impossible to find on the Internet ... until now! We dunnitagain, doggonit. Our sincerest thanks to Tom Merrill for bringing her work to our attention. Her "Sea Fevers" is a poem we wouldn't mind being shipwrecked with.

We're pleased to be able to publish another of Yala Korwin's fine translations of the poetry of Wladyslaw Szlengel. The title of the latest addition to Szlengel's page is "New Holiday," and if you haven't visited his page before, you really should. In fact, we insist! (Nicely, of course).

Sean M. Teaford won the 2004 Veterans for Peace Poetry Contest and has had over 40 poems published (or scheduled to be published) in The Endicott Review, The Aurorean, Spare Change, and elsewhere. He will have two poems from his book of poems, Kaddish Diary, about Janusz Korczak and the children he nurtured and protected during the Holocaust, in the revised edition of Charles Adés Fishman’s anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust.

Freddy Niagara Fonseca is a talented multi-lingual poet, and is also a mover and shaker on the Iowa poetry scene, where he hosts the popular and innovative Candlelight Reading Series. His poetry has appeared in three of our favorite journals: Pivot, The Eclectic Muse, and The Neovictorian/Cochlea.

CarrieAnn Thunell is an artist, photographer, poet, columnist, interviewer and book reviewer whose poetry has appeared in some of our favorite journals, including The Lyric and The Neovictorian/Cochlea. We admire her for "wearing many hats" and helping advance the art of others (two things we've been known to do ourselves).

And last but certainly not least, we're pleased to be able to introduce the no-nonsense poetry of Juleigh Howard-Hobson, whose work is making increasing waves in Formalist circles, including The Raintown Review, edited by last month's featured poet, Harvey Stanbrough.

March 2006: This month's featured poet is Harvey Stanbrough, who has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and several other prestigious awards. Harvey recently resumed editorship of The Raintown Review, one of our favorite poetry journals.

We are more than pleased to announce that we now have English translations of full length poems by Nadia Anjuman, the young Afghani poet who died shortly after her first and only book of poems was published.

Oliver Murray was published in THT's February issue.

Priscilla Barton was also published in the February issue.

The Powow River Anthology looks to be a landmark publication, featuring some of the best contemporary poets working in meter and rhyme. Please check it out and order forthwith!

On a personal note, I was honored to have an interview and ten of my poems published by Poetry Life & Times.  I don't often toot my own horn (er, at least not on THT's pages), but this is one I wouldn't mind readers taking a peek at. Also, while I'm at it, I'd like to share a brief piece called "'Fine, even beautiful,' just not for us" about a poetry submission that crashed and burned despite the editor's evident appreciation of the work. Unless I miss my guess, the editor equated my use of meter and rhyme with "less than modern language." I have posted two of the poems submitted to let readers form their own opinions. Please feel free to comment!—MRB

February 2006: This month, we're very pleased to be able to exclusively feature the poetry and photography of Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy, in addition to being nominated for four Emmy awards, has directed three of the best-selling movies of all time and has won both critical and popular acclaim for his poetry, prose, photography and vocals. We hope you'll visit his photography page, www.leonardnimoyphotography.com, assuming you're 18 or older, as some of his photos are intended for mature audiences.

Oliver Murray is a poet with a deft touch and a sure hand. He submitted ten poems and we couldn't find fault with "nary one of 'em"—so here they all are!

Priscilla Barton is an up-and-coming poet whose words have an authentic ring. 

We have added "Storms" to the poetry page of T. S. Kerrigan. "Storms" was the closing poem in the current issue of The Raintown Review, which featured poetry by several THT poets. Our congratulations to TRR editor Harvey Stanbrough, who has re-taken the helm of TRR, and we highly recommend a subscription to TRR to our readers. We have updated Harvey's page with a number of poems from his just-released book, Beyond The Masks.

We have also put the finishing touches on the poetry page of Quincy R. Lehr, whose work appeared for the first time in the December 2005 issue.

And for good measure, we have "freshened" the page of Judy Jones, an artist, photographer, poet and storyteller who works among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor." We just learned that Judy is facing a life-threatening illness she contracted while doing volunteer hurricane relief work for the Red Cross, and we ask for your prayers on her behalf—not only for her health, but that she will be able to publish two very important books that are dear to her heart. One is on the homeless, and the other is about Mother Teresa. 

January 2006: Thanks to Tom Merrill, who took the time to scan and e-mail THT a number of poems by Leslie Mellichamp, a fine poet who is also well known as the long-time editor of The Lyric, we are pleased to feature Leslie Mellichamp's poetry for a second time.

And we're very pleased to be able to feature the poetry and photography of Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy, in addition to being nominated for four Emmy awards, has directed three of the best-selling movies of all time and has won both critical and popular acclaim for his poetry, prose, photography and vocals.

Takashi “Thomas” Tanemori—descendent of a proud Samurai family, Hiroshima survivor, peace activist, poet and artist—is a man who can share not only hard-earned knowledge and wisdom, but also an ebullient spirit.

Thanks to Amy Waldman, a reporter for the New York Times, we have three more lines of poetry by Nadia Anjuman, along with an account that gives us a glimpse of the young woman behind the poems:  Swathed in black, she curled up like a cat in her professor's study, black eyes peering from an elfin face. She is 20 years old and has written 60 or 70 poems. As the first person in her family to love words, she has had to fight, like a number of Professor Rahyab's students, for her family's cooperation. She has fought, too, to stave off marriage, fearing it will limit her freedom to write. ''I think I've been quite successful,'' she said. ''Girls are expected to marry at 14 or 15.'' She writes mostly about women's lives, ''because we have suffered a lot.'' She read an excerpt in a high voice:

I was discarded everywhere, the poetic whisper in my soul died.
Do not search for the meaning of joy in me, all the joy in my heart died.
If you are looking for stars in my eyes, that is a tale that does not exist.

Please click her hyperlinked name above to read the full account.

The HyperTexts is honored and proud to have been able to publish a number of unique pages of poetry, art and essays about the Holocaust, some of which have never been published elsewhere. In some cases we don't even have the names of these poets, only their words. For the first time, we have "brought together" all these pages into one convenient index of Holocaust Poetry.

December 2005: Mike Snider is our featured poet this month. In addition to writing poetry, he has what we believe may be the only formal poetry blog at Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium. But forget the blog for a moment and read the man's poetry, because it's authentic with the added umpf that only comes from a man having lived what he's writing about. When you've read his poems, by all means check out his blog.

We're pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the work of Anna Evans. Anna is sure to be a featured poet in an upcoming issue of THT, quite possibly next month, so please be sure to tune your browser to THT from time to time. And please be sure to check out the formal poetry e-zine she edits, The Barefoot Muse. Good things are happening in formal circles, and Anna Evans is one of them!

Simon Harrison is another poet we expect to be featuring in an upcoming issue, but neither we nor you would want to wait to read such fine poems, so don't dilly-dally!

Quincy R. Lehr has only been writing poetry seriously since 2003, but he's making up for lost time. His poetry has been published in Iambs and Trochees and Pivot, and all indications are that he'll go far in formal circles, with ever-widening ripples ...

Nadia Anjuman is a young Afghani poet whose life and words deserve to be remembered and honored. We're on the prowl for translations of her work into English, so please contact Mike Burch at mburch@aocg.cm if you know of any.

November 2005: We continue to showcase October's three featured poets: Anton N. (Tony) Marco, Lee Passarella and T. S. Kerrigan. And we're pleased to be able to publish reviews by Midwest Book Review's Laurel Johnson of Outlaw's Retreat by Tom Merrill and 42 Poems in Rhyme & Meter by Mary Keelan Meisel. You can find both reviews on our Essays & Assays page, alongside a review of Emery Campbell's This Gardener's Impossible Dream by Ethelene Dyer Jones. Folks, these are three fine books by three outstanding poets, and we're not going to be shy about tootin' our own horn that we "done brung them out," though in truth all credit goes to the poets and their publisher, Joe Ruggier of MBooks. You can find examples of the work of T. Merrill, Mary Keelan Meisel and Emery Campbell, all recent THT featured poets, by mouseclicking their hyperlinked names. Could we make it any easier fer ya? These books are all first editions printed in initial quantities of 100 books or fewer. Need we say more? Also, we have four late additions this month, just in time for Thanksgiving: R. Nemo Hill, Keith Holyoak, Ellaraine Lockie and Lee Slonimsky. And last but certainly not least, we have a page of art and photos by Karen J. Harlow that includes her "takes" on THT poets Luis Omar Salinas, Michael McClintock and Luis Berriozabal.

Finally, right before Thanksgiving, we're thankful that Laurel Johnson has been kind enough to grace THT with a review.

October 2005: Anton N. (Tony) Marco is a featured poet for the month of October. Tony has been a frequent contributor to THT's pages, and he's also active in the lively Las Vegas poetry scene. 

We're also pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the poetry of Lee Passarella, whose poetry has appeared in Chelsea, The Formalist, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Slant, and other journals of note.

We also continue to feature the poetry of T. S. Kerrigan, a September featured poet.

September 2005: This month we're fortunate and pleased to be able to feature the poetry of T. S. Kerrigan. Kerrigan has been published in The Formalist, Light, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Southern Review, and other journals of good repute. His work was recently included in Good Poetry, an anthology by Garrison Keillor issued by Viking-Penguin. He is also a past president of the Irish American Bar Association, and once argued a case before the Supreme Court, which he won.

We continue to showcase the poetry of Douglas Worth and Michael McClintock, who were our featured poets in August.

We also have completed our first trifecta, by adding our third Yala Korwin page. In addition to her personal poetry and Holocaust poetry pages, we now have a page of her visual art.

And for good measure, we've added three new poems to Esther Cameron's poetry page. Also, we have added yet another superior poem, "To the Golden Gate Bridge," to Moore Moran's page. And we've added a delectable poem with the unlikely title "Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi" to Patrick Kanouse's poetry page. Bon appétit!

Also, we want to make our readers aware that Richard Moore's new book, Sailing to Oblivion, is now available from Light Quarterly Imprints. Moore is one of the best and funniest poets we have, and therefore Sailing to Oblivion is a must-have book. Please click here for more information.

August 2005: This month we're pleased to be able to feature the poetry of Douglas Worth. Worth was recommended to us by THT stalwart Richard Moore, and his work has been acclaimed by Robert Creely, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov and A. R. Ammons, among others.

We're equally pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the work of Michael McClintock, whose name and work are well known in haiku, senryu and tanka circles. In the past he has edited the American Haiku Poets Series and Seer Ox: American Senryu Magazine, and he has also served as Assistant Editor of Haiku Highlights and Modern Haiku. He currently writes the "Tanka Cafe" column for the Tanka Society of America Newsletter, and edits The New American Imagist series for Hermitage West. 

We've also added a new poem, "Diving into Morning" to the poetry page of Tony Marco. We hear that Tony is making waves on the Las Vegas poetry scene, and this poem is a good indication of why he's a "splash hit."

While we're trying to find time / to further inundate the world with rhyme, here's "literary/artistic criticism" from an unexpected but helpful and hopeful source:

Fred McFeely Rogers on Boethius, Saint-Exupery and Yo-Yo Ma

July 2005: We're pleased to announce that MBooks and THT have just published books by Emery Campbell and Mary Keelan Meisel, with books by T. Merrill, Zyskandar Jaimot and other THT poets to follow. To order books and CDs by THT poets, and writers of similar caliber, please click this Books Link. We hope our readers will support our continuing efforts to shine a little poetic light "here, there, everywhere."

In the spirit of Independence day, we're pleased to be able to publish a poem by Meidema Sanchez and a drawing by Victoria Lassen, both 8th graders in the class of Marcella Previdi at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School. The story of how they became inspired to fight anti-Semitism with art was originally carried by the Queen's Tribune on June 9, 2005. Our thanks to THT poet Yala Korwin for helping us obtain the rights to publish the poem and drawing.

Also in the spirit of July 4th, we have put together a page (not very originally) called Let Freedom Sing! Poetic songs of freedom are often wild and dark, as our readers will see ...

Also in keeping with our July 4th theme, we've added a page of poetry by, about and admired by Abraham Lincoln. If you'll read this page, you'll find lines penned by Lincoln that are at times reminiscent of Dickinson, Poe, Clare and Herrick. You'll also find what might be the raciest poem of the 1860s, also written by Lincoln. This bit of ribald doggerel was said to have been "more popular than the Bible" in southern Illinois! Lincoln was a true admirer and lover of poetry, and once remarked of a particular poem, "I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece ..."

THT is pleased to be able to add another fine, refined poem, "Split," to the poetry page of George Held. "Split" was rejected 40 times before finally being accepted. Which proves two things: (1) There is no accounting for taste, especially that of poetry editors. (2) George Held is one perseverant poet, and one to be Held in the highest regard. "Split" will be published in The Art of Bicycling, where it will appear alongside poems by Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove.

We think you'll like our newest Mysterious Ways features:

The Stone of Destiny (the Liath Fàil)
Kids on Love: What the Real Experts Have to Say
Albert Einstein on "Things Mysterious"
The Very Mysterious Metaphor of Entanglement

To read any of the articles above, just click either Mysterious Ways hyperlink.

June 2005: This month we're pleased to be able to feature the poetry of George Held. Many of our readers will recognize his work from The Neovictorian/Cochlea, The New Formalist, Commonweal, and other journals of note. George has a wonderful personal touch on poetic portraits like "Elise" and "Honey," and one cannot help but be impressed with his ability to work Joe DiMaggio, Bill Gates, W. B. Yeats and Euterpe into a single poem ("Finding My Way").

Christopher T. George is another poet new to THT's pages whose name may ring a bell from familiar journals. His poetry has been published in Poet Lore, Melic Review and Triplopia, among others.

Judy Jones is an artist, a photographer, a poet, and a storyteller with fascinating and sometimes out-and-out miraculous tales to tell of her work among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."

THT had been waiting "eagerly with patience" for the right to publish "Monterey County" by Moore Moran, and now our patience has been rewarded. We have also added a brand-spankin'-new poem, "When Paris Lay at Helen's Side," to one of THT's best poetry pages, so please reacquaint yourself with it forthwith. If you've never visited Moore Moran's poetry page, you should heed these sage (ever-so-slightly-paraphrased) words of Mark Twain: "The man who does not read good poems has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

This month we also debut a new Mysterious Ways feature: "Kids on Love: What the Real Experts Have to Say."

May 2005: This month it is our pleasure to feature the poetry of Robert W. Crawford and David Gwilym Anthony. Poetry like theirs need no introduction, so please peruse forthwith! It does bear mentioning that Robert W. Crawford is yet another Powow River Poet, joining Rhina Espaillat, A. M. (Mike) Juster, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Michael Cantor, Michele Leavitt and Midge Goldberg. That's quite a high-wattage assemblage of poets, and we only wish we could dam and bottle the water they drink in "those there parts" and dole it out, Perrier-like, to some of the more arid regions still experiencing the dearth of postmodernism. 

[An interesting sidenote: THT continues to feature the poetry of  Pope John Paul II. In an e-mail to me, Robert Crawford pointed out another of those "harmonic convergences" that seem to happen so often with THT these days: "The odd thing (and very humbling) is that when my poem, 'Olber's Paradox,' was in First Things, that particular issue also featured a review of Pope John Paul II's poetry by Joseph Bottum."—MRB]

Ashok Niyogi has agreed to be a traveling poetic correspondent of sorts for THT, and during his current travels through India and some of the remoter Himalayan hinterlands, he has been kind enough to offer to e-mail us his thoughts and impressions in the form of poems. The first such poem, "Letter to Ulitsa Myitnaya from a Himalayan Hamlet," now appears at the top of his THT poetry page. Please click the hyperlink above / to read a tale of Himalayan love [as always, please pardon the doggerel].

And now, as the cliché goes, "for something new and completely different" ... a fugue in five poetic parts about the various perils and sagas of leaves, by Charles "Charley" Weatherford. And while our introduction may not be the height of originality, the poems themselves are quite original, and good fun to boot!

We're also pleased to introduce a new poem to our Mysterious Ways page. The poem is "Escaping the Light of Day" by Mary L. Mazzocco. We have also added a new featured article to Mysterious Ways: "Did Jesus Walk on the Water?" by serial contributor Judy Jones. This is actually an anecdote and is only incidentally related to the story of Jesus walking on water, but it's a short story that is well worth reading and contemplating.

We have also added a new poem, "The Unveiling of Belzec Monument," and several watercolors and other works of visual art to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

April 2005: Thanks to Esther Cameron, we are pleased to announce that Ethna Carbery is our April featured poet. Our sincerest thanks to Esther for supplying us with a rainbow's-end trove of big-hearted, heartfelt Irish poetry!

Our second featured poet is Mary Keelan Meisel, and this time our thanks goes to Joe Ruggier for arranging for us to be able to use poems of hers that he had previously published through his journal The Eclectic Muse and his Multicultural Books small press.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla was an unknown Polish actor and poet long before he became known to the world as Pope John Paul II. Please click the link to the left to see poetry by Pope John Paul II, along with a fairly comprehensive literary bio. An elegy by Joe Ruggier appears at the bottom of the page. [Editor's note: As I worked on the Pope's bio, I noticed a number of interesting similarities between his "literary bio" and that of Ronald Reagan. They both were actors; they both wrote poetry; as young men they both read what seemed to have been "prophetic manuscripts" which profoundly influenced their lives, and which they later fulfilled (the Pope's was a poem; Reagan's was a book, That Printer of Udell's); they both played vital roles in the downfall of the Evil Empire in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. How interesting that a Polish Catholic Pope and an Irish Protestant President had so much in common!—MRB]

In one of those interesting coincidences or providential convergences that seem to happen quite often, I just finished proofreading a story for a good friend (good in the truest sense of the word because she's doing good work with the poorest of the poor), the artist Judy Jones, and her story Thy Will Be Done (Iron Lung) leads off with a quotation by Pope John Paul II. Her story is on our  Mysterious Ways page. 

Because we were a tad tardy posting his poetry page last month, Ashok Niyogi remains a featured poet this month. Niyogi was born in Calcutta, India and spent more than 25 years working in various parts of the world, including the former USSR and Russia. Now retired from commerce (other than the commerce of words), he is a professional poet and writer who divides his time between the US and India.

Michael Bennett is a new poet to these pages, but some of our readers will remember him from Poem Online, where his sharp eye and a sharper tongue were often wielded to aid and/or dismay young poets in search of tutelage. 

We are pleased to offer two reviews of the third revised edition of This Eternal Hubbub by Joe Ruggier. Please click on this link to our Essays & Assays page to read the reviews: one by Laurel Johnson and one by THT Editor Mike Burch.

We're pleased to announce that THT is now getting between 2,000 to 3,000 hits per month on our main page, more than double the hits THT was getting only a few months ago.

March 2005: T. Merrill is our March featured poet. His poems come like a breath of fresh air on an otherwise insufferably sluggish, muggish August night. Considering the climate of contemporary poetry, we think our readers will appreciate such a freshening! 

Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta, India and spent more than 25 years working in various parts of the world, including the former USSR and Russia. Now retired from commerce (other than that of words), he is a professional poet and writer who divides his time between the US and India. THT was scheduled to publish his work next month, but because he's en route to the Himalayas as this feature is added (and because he's promised to send us pictures and poems thereof to share with our readers), we have elected to send him this poetic "bon voyage!" 

We're delighted to be able to add a truly lovely poem that honors the work of a THT artist, Makoto Fujimura. The poem, "Nihongan Altar," is by Marly Youmans and it appears at the top of her poetry page, so please click on her name to peruse it forthwith. 

Just in time for St. Patrick's day, and thanks entirely to Esther Cameron, we have an exotic page to offer, all about a poet you've surely never heard of, but surely should have: Ethna Carbery (our heartfelt thanks to Esther for a small trove of big-hearted, heartfelt Irish poetry!).

We've also added a new poem, "Morning of Departure" to the poetry page of Tony Marco, and it's another "good 'un" that you won't want to miss.

Finally, we're thankful to Esther Cameron for sending us "The Journey to Unity" by Yosef Ben Shlomo Hakohen, which will adorn and grace our Grace Notes page.

February 2005: June Kysilko Kraeft continues as our February featured poet, along with Len Krisak, who won the Richard Wilbur prize in 2000 for his book Even as We Speak. Also, two poems have been added to the bottom of Norman Kraeft's poetry page: a poem entitled "Crescendo Against Heaven" written by THT's editor, and a touching, gentlemanly poem by Norman Kraeft about understanding that is better read than described.

Simon Perchik has been published in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and many other journals, and "is the most widely published unknown poet in America" according to Library Journal. His poetry is full of what one reviewer calls "elemental tokens": tokens that sometimes seem simultaneously familiar and alien in the landscapes of his poems.

February seems a fine month for THT to be able to introduce its readers to the poetry of  Julie Kane. Her poem "Thirteen" is reminiscent of "At Seventeen" by Janis Ian, a song that has haunted many a teenager to, through and beyond maturity. Kane's poems like "Maraschino Cherries," "Egrets," "Kissing the Bartender" and "Dead Armadillo Song" demonstrate her virtuoso range and what we take for staying power.

We're also pleased
amidst a February freeze
to be able to introduce Laura Heidy,
mother of three:
which makes us sure she's 
weathered sufficient stress 
to be a poetess!

Please pardon the doggerel!

Michele Leavitt is another poet new to THT's pages. She joins our "powow" of Powow River Poets that now includes Rhina Espaillat, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Mike Juster and Michael Cantor. 

Midge Goldberg is another new poet, for us at least, although her poems have appeared in some of our favorite journals, including Edge City Review, Pivot and The Lyric. She's yet another Powow River Poet. Just what do they lace the waters of Powow River with? Someone should bottle it, pronto!

It's a particular pleasure for THT to be able to publish two poems by Leland Jamieson. Please allow me to digress, if I may, in a very un-editorly way (or so I hope). While it may be true that power is a dangerous thing, especially in untrained hands, there is a inevitably a downside. The downside to having editorial power—surely the most negligible power imaginable, or perhaps not—is that sometimes the editor ends up in the uncomfortable position of really wanting to publish a poet, yet having to toe the line of his ticklish, pricklish personal inhibitions. My personal inhibition as an editor is that sometimes a poem seems good, but still seems wrong, simply because it could, and therefore should, be better. What I really want is for the poet to see the potential of his or her own poem. If I can see the poem's potential for betterment, why can't the poet? Almost invariably such a proposition leads to an impasse. I hold out that the poem can be improved. The poet holds out that it is already quite obviously perfect. If I defend my position too strongly, the poem doesn't get published. Ditto with the poet. In such impasses, only the better poets prevail over the beleaguered editor, whose last line of defense is invariably "You talk a better poem than you write." But sometimes a poet is amenable to critique and something wonderful happens: the poem improves, it gets published, and everyone involved wins: editor, poet and especially readers. I like to think something like this happened with these poems of Leland Jamieson's. I've been pulling for Lee to make the THT "cut" for some time, and now he has. The best thing of all is that the poems are clever, well written, and (to borrow a word from one of Lee's poems), they "electrify."—MRB

Tara A. Elliott is yet another poet new to THT. She and Gene Justice are co-editors of Triplopia, an eZine that has published work by several THT poets, and she has been a multiple gold medal winner of the Net Poetry & Arts Contest (NPAC), which has been judged by THT poets Tony Marco, Jennifer Reeser, Harvey Stanbrough and Joyce Wilson.

Rhina Espaillat's poem "You Who Sleep Soundly Through Our Bleakest Hour" has been added to her THT poetry page, and also to Mysterious Ways. Also new to her poetry page is "Arbol Vecino," a Spanish translation of Robert Frost's "Tree at My Window," which has been on a banner with the English original, on exhibit all summer in various city parks of Lawrence, MA ...

Esther Cameron's review of THT's Holocaust Poetry now appears on our Essays & Assays page.

January 2005: This month we have a very special featured poet, June Kysilko Kraeft. As many of our "insiders" and "frequent fliers" know by now, June Kraeft passed away July 21st of last year. June was a writer, a poet, a photographer, a cook, a prize-winning horticulturist, and the co-author with her husband Norman Kraeft of several books on American art. Her THT poetry page will not only showcase her own poetry, but will also be a place for family, friends and admirers to say their last words on her behalf. If you knew June Kraeft, or if you read and admired her poetry, please feel free to e-mail your thoughts, poetry or prose, to THT's editor at mburch@aocg.com. 

This tribute page will be a work in progress that will be updated frequently, so please visit it  throughout the month.

Our thanks to Richard Moore for contributing his thoughtful, insightful essay "Pain and Death" to Mysterious Ways, where it is now the featured article. 

The HyperTexts does not solicit funds for ourselves, but we're not above asking our visitors to help raise funds for a worthy cause. Here's a link from which you can select a charitable organization involved in the current Tsunami relief effort: www.justgive.org/tsunami/index.jsp. It pays to be careful. Before my wife and I made a donation to the American Red Cross, I called their 800 number and made sure I knew how to go about making sure our donation would go directly to the Tsunami relief effort, via the International Red Cross. Of course, we don't want to neglect worthy American charities, but if we all give what we normally give to our charities of choice, and if we all "sweeten the pot" by giving something additional to the many fine organizations helping out in South-East Asia, many lives will be saved and much disease, starvation and further tragedy will be avoided. Also, it's my understanding that contributions to the Tsunami relief effort before January 31st will be deductible on our 2004 federal income tax returns. So perhaps we can all compute our taxes early this year, and for every extra dollar we donate, the U.S. government will, in effect, "chip in!"—MRB

We continue to feature Wladyslaw Szlengel because Yala Korwin has been kind enough to translate several of his poems and allow THT to publish them first. These are important poems by an important poet most readers have never encountered. If you've missed our past issues, you may want to visit related pages that  THT has published recently: Esther Cameron's translations of poems about Janusz Korczak, a page of writings (some recast as poems) by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, poetry by the third Pulitzer Prize nominee we've published, Charles Adés Fishman, a page of Yala Korwin's translations of the poems of Jerzy Ficowski and Jewish ghetto poets, and a special page of Yala Korwin's own Holocaust poetry.

December 2004: We have added a poetry page for Wladyslaw Szlengel that ties in well with similar poetry pages THT has published recently: Esther Cameron's translations of poems about Janusz Korczak, a page of writings (some recast as poems) by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, poetry by the third Pulitzer Prize nominee we've published, Charles Adés Fishman, a page of Yala Korwin's translations of the poems of Jerzy Ficowski and Jewish ghetto poets, and a special page of Yala Korwin's own Holocaust poetry.

This month we're pleased to introduce our readers to the work of Jill Williams, who numbers among her credits a Broadway musical, songwriting, an album published by RCA Victor, celebrity interviews, four nonfiction books, two poetry books, and poems in some of our favorite journals, including Light Quarterly, Edge City Review and The Lyric. She has dared to capture a yawning lion on film, and (even more daringly) has taught creative writing to college students! Oh, and she also does poetry readings across the United States and Canada.

We're also tickled pink 'n' polka dots to be able to publish the light verse of Edmund Conti, an accomplished humorist who has had over 500 poems published, although he claims not to keep count! Somehow we suspect he's not highly enough paid (is any living poet?) to make your lawsuit anything other than frivolous, so we suggest you rest your case and indulge in a little light-hearted frivolity.

It's an honor and a pleasure to introduce our readers to the poetry of Marc Widershien, an accomplished, often-published poet whose influences include Samuel French Morse, John Malcolm Brinnin, Robert Lowell, Daisy Aldan and Ezra Pound.

Len Krisak will be the featured poet in an upcoming issue of THT, but we're pleased to be able to offer our readers a "sneak preview" of his poetry page just in time to kick off the new year with a bang!

Also this month we've updated the poetry page of  Zyskandar Jaimot with a new poem, "Siacon," and some of Zaj's own amazing imitations of the masters. If you haven't seen his page lately, you'd be remiss to miss the changes we've made! 

November 2004: This month we're pleased to be able to review The Consciousness of Earth, a book-length epic poem by this month's Featured Poet, Esther Cameron. The Consciousness of Earth strikes me as an important poem, so much so that I took the time out of a hectic, haphazard schedule to review it myself. Hopefully, other more qualified reviewers will step forward to do the poem better justice. I'd love to hear what Richard Moore and other THT luminaries think about Esther's poem, in depth. Till we hear from them, If you're interested to hear what I think about the poem, please review my review forthwith. We've also added two new poems to Esther's poetry page, so please be sure to "check in and check out" both hyperlinked pages above. Also, as a corollary to Esther's pages and to the pages of Holocaust poetry we featured from August to October, THT is pleased to be able to feature a page of writings by, and poems about, Janusz Korczak. These are compelling words about a compelling figure in the history of man's seemingly never-ending struggle to overcome evil: in this case the most loathsome evil of all, the evil that slaughters defenseless children.

We've "broken the mold" so to speak, and have published Jo-Anne Cappeluti's "Letter to Lord Auden" (an exception we think you'll be glad we made). While THT doesn't generally publish extremely long poems, this one seems worth many hyperbolic acres of hyperspace. And while we insist on a cluckish matronly "Tsk! Tsk!" to paper-and-ink journals for making poems like Jo-Anne's virtually impossible to publish these days (imagine: a long poem that, egad!, rhymes), we're happy to be able to do our part and publish it "virtually." So much so, in fact, that we're also publishing another longish poem by the same poet: "The Impotence of Being Earnest(ine)."

Another new poet this month (or at least new to THT) is Catherine Chandler. Catherine has been writing formal poetry for some time, but is somewhat new to the "publication game." So, as we say in these parts, we're "right proud" to be among the first journals to publish her work, along with two of our favorites: The Lyric and Iambs & Trochees.

J. Patrick Lewis is a poet of considerable formal skill who seems to enjoy poetry and a good laugh as much as the children he exuberantly teaches. So we hope you'll not only visit his THT poetry page, but use it to explore his web site, which will be of interest to anyone who has children, grandchildren, or who remains something of a child at heart.

Carolyn Raphael is a poet whose name will be instantly recognized by those who run in formal circles, which means she's among good friends here.

Wendy Videlock is an up-and-coming poet whose work has been published by a number of excellent journals and web sites. 

We've also added a new poem "From a Widow's Diary—9/11/01" to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

We also have a bit of wonderful late-breaking news: Jared Carter, a THT Featured Poet, has been invited to read his work at the Library of Congress on December 9, 2004. For more information, please click here.

We are also pleased to be able to publish a new essay, "Thomas Stearns Eliot, an Early Re-assessment for the New Century" by Joe Ruggier. This essay is very much in the spirit of our new Grace Notes page (more on this below). How refreshing to read that a contemporary poet not only values Eliot as a poet, critic and mentor, but as a source of consolation and comfort!

Please check our Thanksgiving special, which includes two hard-to-find poems by Langston Hughes, along with various pearls of wisdom and poems from Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, Edward Arlington Robinson, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, and others. Frequenters of THT will be pleased to find poems and excerpts of poems by a number of THT poets: Jim Barnes, Beverly Burch, Jack Butler, Esther Cameron, Jared Carter, Rhina P. Espaillat. I even manage to sneak in a "poem" of my own, perhaps my first or second haiku or haiku-like poem (a fairly recent happenstance, and one not highly likely to be repeated). But there are extenuating circumstances, explained alongside the poem.

Also this month THT is introducing a new page, called Grace Notes. The purpose of this page is to explore what may be "the last best hope for the world" through poetry, literature, art, quotations, articles and brief essays. After the recent U.S. presidential election, it's obvious there are deep political and religious divisions everywhere, and that these divisions are now permanent features of an increasingly fissure-scarred landscape. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: "Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse." Numerous deep fissures and a thing implodes—even if it's the ground beneath our feet. I've been shocked at the enmity—indeed the raw, unmitigated hatred—that I've heard poets and intellectuals express for people who have the audacity to disagree with them. Folks, to disagree is human, and it's certainly the American way. Always has been, always will be. Poets express all sorts of contradictory views, and often they contradict in one line what they had just said—impressively and eloquently—in the preceding line. And yet today poets are childishly fretting themselves into nervous wrecks because the other side is too stupid to see that we are obviously, undeniably, incontrovertibly right. Only it ain't so obvious if 50 million of our neighbors disagree with us. Don't we see that it doesn't matter which side we're on, when things are split almost evenly down the middle, if everything collapses? When a fissure becomes a full blown chasm, what is needed is a bridge—a way to meet in the middle, to cross freely over in both directions, and to rejoin family and friends on the opposite side. What we need is, in a word, grace. We need the grace to understand, reconcile with, and most of all, to forgive millions upon millions of highly fallible human beings ... keeping in mind that we are immanently fallible creatures ourselves. No one has a lock on good ideas that don't cause much good to be brought about, or on bad ideas that seemed good until they were enacted imperfectly. We need to be gracious to each other and forgive each other, because there are no easy answers to the problems the world faces today. War is not the answer. Neither is pacifism. The rich should pay more taxes than the poor, but exactly how much more? Do you know the exact difference to a tenth of a percent, really? I know that I don't. Bush is no Abraham Lincoln, but then Kerry is no FDR. And even Lincoln and FDR had legions of detractors who were quite sure they would be the "end of the United States as we know it." And in a way, both of them were. But the United States survived, matured and grew beyond its present circumstances. And we can't forget that the first incarnation of the United States had slavery and virtually no rights for women. Now, today, we have abolished slavery and I can't get my wife to agree with me on anything, especially politics, and I am utterly without recourse except to love her despite her temerity to disagree with me. Four years from now, all indications are that Hillary Clinton will run for president. Isn't that progress? Despite what seems like evidence to the contrary, democracy does work, albeit slowly and "windingly." The biggest danger I can see is that we lack the grace to disagree and remain friends, in which case our worst enemies will be us. The next time you have a disagreement with your spouse or lover, perhaps these haphazard thoughts and hopes of mine will congeal into something resembling a salve.—MRB

August 2004: This month we're pleased to be able to feature Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel along with the third Pulitzer Prize nominee we've published, Charles Adés Fishman. And we're doubly delighted to be able to bring our readers wonderfully moving translations by Yala Korwin: translations of the poems of Jerzy Ficowski and of Jewish ghetto poets who speak to us now—largely anonymously, and thus forever united, as one Voice—from the ghettos of WWII-era Poland. And for good measure, we have a special page of Yala Korwin's own Holocaust poetry.

Also, our thanks to Esther Cameron for allowing us to link to her outstanding Point & Circumference Homage to Paul Celan. And here's a link to the Norton Poets Online page for Paul Celan.  Esther Cameron personally recommends the University of Wisconsin's Paul Celan page. 

By all means, please check out our Elie Wiesel page forthwith, because the man truly is a witness and a testament. Some, many, perhaps most poets jot down incongruously amorphous dreams and insist on calling them "visions," but Elie Wiesel has lived through the world's worst nightmare to clearly see, and to help us see, that ordinary men and women who persevered in love have salvaged true dreams from the blackest, sorriest, stinkingest pits of hell.  As I write these lines, I'm reminded of Hart Crane's "Broken Tower":

And so it was I entered the broken world 
To trace the visionary company of love ...

We poets would like to think that we're the visionary company, but often I wonder. Then I hear a man like Elie Wiesel speak, and I hear the clear-ringing, far-pealing authenticity of truth. Poetry is not only meant to be beautiful and transcendent, as though that is its entire purpose for being, or validates its being. Poetry is meant to enlighten the hearts and minds and souls of readers. Poetry, to be poetry, must communicate, and what it communicates must matter. When men and women have been ripped from their homes, torn from their families, robbed, beaten, raped, spat upon, ridiculed, transported and prodded like cattle, gassed like vermin—with every expectation that they would be expediently and efficiently exterminated from the face of the earth—when such men and women triumph over their goose-stepping "superiors," we know that anything is possible, if we only stay the course and dare to love, no matter the consequences. Were  not the poets and rabbis, the mothers and fathers and children of ghettos and concentration camps heroes, when they shared bread and soup with loved ones at the risk of their own lives? Were not their captors and processors and jailers and killers demons (or, perhaps worse!, mindless, soulless automatons) unworthy even of our pity? Our hearts break for the victims, even as they sink in our breasts at the indescribable evil of Hitler and his "superman" (as in "supermaniacal") cronies, but the voices of Elie Wiesel, Charles Adés Fishman, Jerzy Ficowski, Yala Korwin and many nameless dead poets preserve the memory of love in words and pictures that prove to our hearts we're still human.

On the chance that you've read this far and haven't yet explored the poetry, let me offer Elie Wiesel's words as an example of the kind of truth and illumination to be found:

The Jews who lived in the ghettos under the Nazi occupation 
showed their independence by leading an organized clandestine life.  
The teacher who taught the starving children was a free man. 
The nurse who secretly cared for the wounded, the ill and the dying was a free woman. 
The rabbi who prayed, 
the disciple who studied, 
the father who gave his bread to his children, 
the children who risked their lives by leaving the ghetto at night 
in order to bring back to their parents a piece of bread 
or a few potatoes, 
the man who consoled his orphaned friend, 
the orphan who wept with a stranger for a stranger—
these were human beings filled with an unquenchable thirst for freedom and dignity. 
The young people who dreamed of armed insurrection, 
the lovers who, a moment before they were separated, 
talked about their bright future together, 
the insane who wrote poems, 
the chroniclers who wrote down the day's events 
by the light of their flickering candles—
all of them were free in the noblest sense of the word, 
though their prison walls seemed impassable 
and their executioners invincible.

— From "What Really Makes Us Free" by Elie Wiesel

In closing, I'd like to publish a letter by one of the most talented, loveliest and nicest poets I know: Rhina Espaillat ...

"I've just visited the site—after a long time away from the internet altogether, because I've been up to the ears in projects, paperwork, translations and houseguests!—and I want to tell you how lovely it is, and how unfailingly interesting and instructive it remains. The addition of new work by Yala [Korwin], and the use of the photograph to accompany one of her poems, are great assets to the site and one more gift you've given the reading public."

"The guidelines for the [highly recommended 2005] Newburyport Art Association Annual Poetry Contest are on-line at the NAA  Gallery website at www.newburyportart.org [questions can be direct to Rhina at espmosk@verizon.net]. The 2004 NAA poetry contest was judged by the distinguished William Jay Smith." [If you're a poet, it's well worth the price of  entry just to be able to correspond with  Rhina Espaillat! I would immediately suggest concocting a plausible, semi-plausible or implausible question, just to be able to tell your grandkids you have proof positive that, yes, there really does exist such a strange, delightful creature as a truly talented, truly nice, truly gracious poet. Such creatures are rarer then unicorns!  Please be sure to ask for and save her electronic signature, because it's sure to be quite valuable one day.—MRB]

"And here's some very sad news you may not have heard yet: I had a call two nights ago from Norman Kraeft, to tell me that [his wife] June died July 21, after a painful but mercifully brief bout with pancreatic cancer. She died—and I was not surprised to hear this—as courageously and uncomplainingly as she had lived, and left behind a final magnificent poem she had not shown anyone. He read it to me on the phone; it gave me goose pimples. Luckily he has very good friends living nearby who have been helpful and kind."

"And, finally, much happier news from here. I have two new publications out this year: a full-length book titled The Shadow I Dress In, from David Robert Books (it won their Stanzas Prize), and a little chapbook titled The Story-teller's Hour, from Scienter Press. Also, several of my translations of Robert Frost poems into Spanish are being used by the Robert Frost Foundation as part of their coming Frost Festival on October 23, in Lawrence. One of them—my Spanish version of "Tree at my Window"—is on display all summer, with the English original, on a banner that's flying in several of the city parks of Lawrence, a nearby city in which Frost and his wife both grew up, and that now has a large Hispanic population. I'm very pleased over that, as I like to see the arts used to forge living links between neighbors from different cultural groups."

Our prayers are with Norman Kraeft, a true gentleman and a fine poet. We hope to be able to offer our readers a poetic tribute to June Kraeft, as soon as an appropriate time presents itself. In the meantime, if you knew June Kraeft and would like to memorialize her memory in your own words, please do so and e-mail them to me at mburch@aocg.com forthwith.—MRB

July 2004: This month we are pleased to be able to feature the work of Makoto Fujimura. Fujimura is an artist and an essayist, but his art is poetic and his essays are poetic, and it's hard to imagine that anyone will quibble if we make an exception (to our rule of normally featuring poets) in his case. It helps our case (not that our case needs help) that Fujimura has created art based on T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets."  Noted artist and critic Robert Kushner tells us: "The idea of forging a new kind of art, about hope, healing, redemption, refuge, while maintaining visual sophistication and intellectual integrity is a growing movement, one which finds Fujimura's work at the vanguard."

We are also featuring the work of Edward Zuk, who has an interesting background to complement his highly interesting, skillfully written poetry. Zuk was born in Surrey, British Columbia, in 1971. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics and English from the University of British Columbia and went on to earn an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, where he wrote his dissertation on uses of the sonnet by American poets of the first half of the 20^th century. Being half-Japanese, he has pursued haiku poetry to explore that part of his heritage. He has served as the British Columbia coordinator for Haiku Canada.

Beverly Burch is also new to our pages, and no, she's not related to me [THT editor Michael R. Burch]. But the way she writes poetry, I'd like to think, or at least imply, that I share a few poetic genes with her! 

We also continue to feature the work of June's Featured Poet, Moore Moran. And for good measure, we also continue to feature our tribute page to Ronald Reagan, with lines of his own poetry "batting leadoff."

We have also added an important, touching picture to the poetry page of Yala Korwin. The picture inspired her poem "The Little Boy with His Hands Up." We hope you'll revisit the poem now that the picture is in place. Yala Korwin's poem and an essay "The America I Love" by Elie Wiesel, graciously mailed to us by THT poet Esther Cameron, seem to go hand in hand, and so we have also added a poetry page and links to six important essays by Elie Wiesel. We hope you'll take time to read these essays by a Nobel Peace Laureate who reminds us:

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance.
To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth.
Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.
The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters,
teachers and disciples.
I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests.
And so are you.

— From "Have You Learned the Most Important Lesson of All" by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was described by the Nobel Committee in 1986 as “a messenger to mankind,” whose “message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity.”

We've also added three poems to the poetry page of Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, and they're poems you won't want to miss (and will be excuseless if you do).

At the Art of Love competition organized by LondonArt.co.uk (Britain's largest contemporary art website, exhibiting nearly 10,000 artworks by over 750 artists), two of Carmen Willcox's  poems were selected to appear in an exhibition (and accompanying catalog) at the Arndean gallery in London during February 2004. The poetry entries were judged by Andrew Motion, Britain's Poet Laureate. We've updated Carmen's poetry page, and we invite you to revisit it, or to visit it for the first time if you've been remiss in the past . . .

And to wrap things up, here's an Uncle Flatboot review of The HyperTexts originally published by www.triplopia.com (our thanks to Triplopia editor Gene Justice and to "Uncle Flatboot" himself, Paul Sonntag, for allowing us to use the review here).

June 2004: Our featured poet this month is Moore Moran. Readers have only to expend a hyperclick to find themselves vigorously nodding agreement with John M. Daniel, who says:  “Moran is a fine writer, a really wonderful poet. He shows education without showing it off; he shows sensitivity without being sentimental." As is so often the case with the fine poets we publish, the poems of Moore Moran need no further assistance on our part, so please indulge yourselves forthwith!

Also this month we've updated the poetry page of  Zyskandar Jaimot with two new poems. The  poems are "Substance of the image" and "Abraham's Diner, Machias, Maine."

We also have a tribute page to Ronald Reagan, with lines of his own poetry batting leadoff. We hope it might please and surprise our readers to know that Reagan at age 17 penned the following lines:

Our troubles break and drench us. 
Like spray on the cleaving prow 
Of some trim Gloucester schooner. 
As it dips in a graceful bow ...

Our Ronald Reagan page is still under construction but is worth checking out. If you have a poem, essay, anecdote, one-liner, or anything else you'd like to see added to this page, please submit it forthwith. To do so, please click the e-mail link on my poetry page at the bottom of the Contemporary Poets index.—MRB

April 2004: Our featured poet this month is Robert Mezey, about whose poetry we could go on at length, but whose words need no assistance on our part. We agree wholeheartedly with Galway Kinnell that what we find in  Robert Mezey's work "that ultimate tenderness toward existence which is the dream of great poems." We welcome you to enter and discover, in the poet's own words, "the warm rooms of the pentameter."

We are also pleased to be able to publish the poetry of V. Ulea, the pen name of Vera Zubarev. Ulea is a literary critic, writer, and film director. She has a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Pennsylvania where she currently teaches. She has published books of prose, poetry, and literary criticism and has recently finished her full feature movie, Four Funny Families, based on Chekhov’s plays. Readers familiar with  Neovictorian/Cochlea and The Eclectic Muse will no doubt  recognize her distinctive style and themes.

We have also added four new poems to the poetry page of Marly Youmans, and we know that you will enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed publishing them.

March 2004: Our featured poet this month is Luis Omar Salinas, and we are especially honored to have been given the rights to publish his major poems in perpetuity. Although it will take some time for us to publish our entire allotment of the career-defining poems Luis Omar Salinas has personally selected for The HyperTexts, please click on the hyperlink above to see the poems we have published to date. As Zyskander Jaimot says in the introduction he penned for our readers : "Yes, attention should be paid to Luis Omar Salinas. Attention paid, to a fine poet." We couldn't agree more! Also, please read an excellent tribute poem to Luis Omar Salinas, contributed by another outstanding poet, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal. 

We have another tribute poem, this one dedicated to Leslie Mellichamp by Norman Kraeft.

Also, please check out our latest, greatest page: Mysterious Ways. Mysterious Ways will be a permanent feature, updated frequently, akin to our Masters and Esoterica pages. We are also accepting unsolicited submissions for Mysterious Ways; please see the page intro for submissions guidelines. However, we will not allow poems to "limbo" beneath our high standards bar, so please be forewarned and submit your very best poems!

We know that many of our readers are writers, and we also know that writers are always interested in having quality books published at reasonable prices. Although we don't allow ourselves to be paid for advertising, we're not above "playing matchmaker" to writers and publishers. So this month we're suggesting that if you want the best possible book published at the best possible rates, please consider Joe Ruggier's excellent small press and publishing service:

MBooks is a small press run by Joe Ruggier, a much-published writer and one of the best-selling  poets in Canada. In a century that has seen "big name" poets sell perhaps only dozens of "important" books, Joe Ruggier has single-handedly sold over 20,000 books! (About half his own books, the other half those of other writers.)  If you want to deal with an editor and publisher who is also a poet and who knows how to create books that actually sell, we can't think of a man or woman better qualified than Joe Ruggier. For explanation of the services he provides to other writers, please click here. We have a feeling you'll be glad you did.

Yet another worthy cause is the new poetry collection listening to the birth of crystals, edited by Alan Corkish and co-edited by Andrew Young. For information on ordering listening to the birth of crystals, please visit Alan Corkish's web site and browse down to the bottom of the  "Publications by Alan Corkish" page. Proceeds go to benefit deaf children, and the poets include Harvey Stanbrough, Mary Gribble, William J. Middleton, and others our readers will undoubtedly recognize, and prize. 

November 2003: Our featured poet this month is Norman R. Shapiro, who has supplied us with too many outstanding poems for us to possibly do them justice in a single issue. Which presents us with two dilemmas: what to use, and what to leave out. Rather than leaving out more than we can use in one sitting, we hope to be able to publish (pending his approval) a small number of poems from several of Shapiro's excellent books in semi-regular installments over the next few months. Please stay tuned, but in the meantime you can find three superb translations from Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems from "Les Fleurs du mal by clicking the hyperlink above.

We're also pleased to be able to publish the poetry of Marly Youmans, of whom no less an authority than William Harmon says, "I wish more poems were like these."

We've added two poems to the poetry page of Joe Ruggier: two poems he says are among his "best-loved creations." And we've also added Esther Cameron's insightful review of Ruggier's "Door-to-Door to CD-ROM" literary CD, which is a collection of nineteen books on one disk.

October 2003: Our featured poet this month is Alfred Dorn. Dr. Dorn has been absolutely essential to the preservation of an endangered species: traditional English poetry. A former Vice President of the Poetry Society of America, he is the Director of the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, which has sponsored international contests since 1980. His efforts on behalf of traditional poetry, narrative and metrical poetry in particular, are greatly to be applauded. And Dom is a  poet, critic, and art historian of note, having won more than seventy awards. Anthony Hecht tells us, "The poems of Alfred Dom seem to me vigorous, imaginative and original, graced with elegant formalities when the occasion warrants, manumitted and free when the spirit moves." We invite you to experience those elegant formalities by clicking on the link above.

We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Michael Cantor, whose poetry reflects a variety of interests and influences, and ranges from traditional sonnets to rib-tickling humor to oriental affairs. 

The HyperTexts is pleased to be the first on-line journal to announce the availability of a new poetry CD edited by Joe Ruggier, a CD in which I was pleased to play a very small part.  The CD is a compilation of nineteen books which Joe has painstakingly converted to .PDF format, and it's a great value for the price, which you can obtain from Joe by clicking the link above and going to the bottom of his poetry page, where you will find his address and phone number. You really should call Joe on the phone if only to hear what my wife says is "the loveliest, gentlest voice ... a boon for the soul." Beth, who seldom reads poetry except for the poems I write about her (which she wisely professes to like, in between stifled yawns), upon having spoken to Joe on the phone for the first time, made me immediately find her all the poems of Joe's that I had in my possession. Do you think she's ever asked to read all my poems? Hah! Back to the CD: the books include The Best of The Eclectic Muse (1989-2003), collections of poems by George Borg, Mary Meisel, Roy Harrison, Philip Higson, John Laycock, and Ruggier; "Savitri," a long prose poem by Chandrampatti; a collection of letters in verse between Ruggier and Esther Cameron; and a collection of letters between Ruggier and Roy Harrison. My contribution to the CD was technical assistance with the autostart feature of the CD, done through the computer consultancy I own and the valiant efforts of Fred Born and Rod Allen, two of my programmers. It turns out that older versions of Windows can only autostart programs, not files such as the Table of Contents file Joe needed to have launched automatically when the CD is inserted in a user's drive. But Fred, Rod and I put our heads together and found a freeware program that can launch Adobe Acrobat Reader even when the exact name and version of the AAR program are unknown, if not saving the day, at least helping to end it on a poetic note.

Last month I mentioned an "Arkansas connection" with Greg Alan Brownderville joining Jim Barnes, Jack Butler, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn on THT's pages.  This month, with the addition of Michael Cantor, I think it bears mentioning that we also have a "powow" of Powow River Poets that, in addition to Mr. Cantor, includes Rhina Espaillat, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak and Mike Juster.  For information on a poetry workshop "done right," please click on this link to our write-up on the Powow River Poets and the poetry contest they sponsor in conjunction with the Newburyport Arts Association.  Even more importantly, please browse our Contemporary Poets index and read the work of these fine poets. 

After I posted the October issue, Rhina Espaillat e-mailed me the following: " It's wonderful, also, to have our group [the Powow River Poets] mentioned in the same issue with Alfred Dorn, who is an old and valued friend to me, from NYC days, and to the Powows. He's honored us by reading here several times, with his wife, Anita, who is a fine poet herself. I can't tell you what a difference this man has made in the lives of the countless poets he's taught, encouraged, and spurred to new effort and new thought, both through example and through his unique yearly contest. Many of us wait all year for the World Order of Narrative & Formalist Poets Contest guidelines, which are like notes from several excellent college seminars! The kind of competition his contest engenders has little to do with money, and everything to do with meeting the challenges tossed out by a first-rate poetic and critical intelligence. But what he really is, at heart, is the kindest and most generous of mentors: any number of young poets today will attest to that." Of course, we know many poets who feel exactly the same way about Rhina!

I'd also like to share Rhina's comments about THT poet Yala Korwin: "I want to tell you again what a joy it is to see Yala Korwin's work posted on your site, attracting the readers she deserves. Her poetry gives the lie to the remark by Paul Celan that she uses as an epigraph to one of her poems, about the impossibility of telling one's own truth in a language that is not one's first. Yala's work is so passionate and wise about her truth—the truth of her personal experience and that of her generation—that it would somehow make itself understood if she stammered it in Chinese! Thank you for giving a forum to those of us who try to defy Celan's observation by doing our "telling"—our singing—in the language of the Other."

On a personal note, I was pleased and surprised to have Writer's Digest call me on the phone with the news that two of my poems ("See" and "At Wilfred Owen's Grave") had finished 3rd and 7th out of over 18,000 overall contest entries in the recent Writer's Digest Rhyming Poetry Contest. The poems are a mouse-click away for anyone who'd like to peruse them: just click here. — MRB

September 2003: Our featured poet this month is John Morgan. His poetry has appeared in some of our favorite journals, including Light Quarterly, The Neovictorian/Cochlea and The Eclectic Muse. But that's virtually all that we know about him, other than that we like his poetry, and that we know you will too.

We have another poet new to THT this month: Greg Alan Brownderville, who tells us: "I was born and reared in a musical family of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, where I absorbed the blues, Southern gospel, country preaching saturated with the King James Bible, and the rural rhythms of life in the Mississippi River Delta. Rhythm ruled." Biblical, rural, biblical-rural, rural-biblical ... no matter the names we contrive for the rhythms of his poems, they seem simultaneously both unique and familiar—a hallmark of the best blues and gospel music.

Just in time for fall, we've added "Spring Villanelle" to the poetry page of Tony Marco, and it was an interesting experience to see Tony reconstruct this nearly forgotten poem from memory, as he e-mailed in tantalizing passages as they returned to him. And to top things off, we've added new poems by Frost, Poe and Dickinson to our Masters page.

Interestingly, we have quite an Arkansas connection forming on the pages of THT, as we add Greg Alan Brownderville to a group of fine poets with Arkansas roots: Jim Barnes, Jack Butler, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn. And because my wife hails from Arkansas and has introduced me to the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival, mayhaw jelly, garlic cheese grits, vacation houses on stilts, and other such esoterica ... well, I feel that I have a foot in the door of this rather exclusive club!—MRB

August 2003: Our featured poet this month is Esther Cameron.  Esther Cameron is not only a talented poet, but she's also an editor, essayist and critic with a finger at the pulse of modern poetry.  One is tempted to say that the critic's finger is likely to find the condition of the patient critical, but actually the Muse's vital signs seem to be improving as of late. And that's due in no small part to the efforts of multiple-hat-wearing poets like Esther Cameron, who in the process of living and breathing poetry, have managed to breathe the breath of life back into what might have otherwise been merely a lovely corpse.  Where would traditional poetry have been without the efforts of men and women like John Nixon, Leslie Mellichamp, John Mella, William Baer, Jim Barnes and Esther Cameron?  They were not content to watch traditional poetry painfully expire, and the energy and hard work they expended on her behalf should not go unacknowledged. Esther asked us to publish some of her career-defining poems in chronological order, which were more than happy to do.  Esther also has essays on our Essays & Assays page, and her poetic tribute to Paul Celan, "The World's Last Rose" is our featured work.

It's a pleasure for us to be able to publish the work of Max Gutmann.  His poem "The Villanelle's Appeal" had stuck in my mind (a good thing for a poem to do) ever since I first read it in Piedmont Literary Review.  So when Max queried us about a submission to THT, I immediately asked if he'd let us use "The Villanelle's Appeal," which he graciously did.  Max Gutmann's work has appeared frequently in Light Quarterly, so prepare to be both amused and be-mused . . .

Also, we've added three new poems to the poetry page of Richard Moore, the three poems at the top of his page.  For readers new to THT, Richard Moore's poetry page is a good place to start browsing, because the man is simply a helluva poet: a poet who will be known to future generations if we have anything to say in the matter.  Or even if we don't and good taste in poetry has anything to do with who gets read.  A poem of Moore's that I particularly like is "In the Dark Season," and to me these three lines are an almost perfect description of the mysterious art of writing poetry:

One studied a new language in the darkness,
looked far down into the well,
into the hints of sunlight in its depths.

I'd encourage our readers to do what I have done myself: buy all of Richard's books, read his poems, study his essays.  Get him to sign his books, because according to Richard he's pissed off his share of publishers, which means his signature may be a rare and valuable commodity in the future.—MRB

July 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jack Butler, who says of himself, "I am a noise-scarred singer, but by god I still hold the true note."  That's no idle boast; his poetry will add multiple exclamation marks to anything anyone might say about him or his work.  Jack Butler is simply one of the best poets writing today, and if you haven't read "For Her Surgery" or "Electricity" before, you have missed out, until now.  Get back into the loop of poetry sparking like a live wire by clicking here.

We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Yala Korwin, who came to English poetry in the most roundabout of ways, but we're glad she did.

We also have a several new additions to our Essays & Assays page, including two reviews of Joe Ruggier's Songs of Gentlest Reflection, one by Mary Rae, the other by yours truly.—MRB

Hot off the Press:  For anyone who appreciates the poetry of Jim Barnes, please read the "news flash" below and take the time to express your support for Jim's recent appointment as Distinguished Visiting Professor of English to BYU's English Department Chair,  Edward Geary, by e-mail at Edward_Geary@BYU.edu.  And please CC me at mburch@aocg.com.  For more information, click here.—MRB 

June 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jim Barnes.  Samuel Maio tells us, and we concur, that "Barnes is a masterful poet, a most worthy voice for his generation."  Brian Bedard says "His poems are a singing in the rain which he knows falls on us all but which, in spite of its chilling touch, also gives life to the earth we must wander over and disappear into."  James Dickey says "It is a deep new pleasure to come on a poet with the imaginative boldness of Jim Barnes."  So without further ado, let us point you to his poetry page.

We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Kevin Walzer.  Kevin has published three books of literary criticism and has had poetry published in Connecticut Review, Sparrow, Poetry Magazine, and other journals.  He is also one of the founders of WordTech Communications.  Publishing through Word Press and other imprints, WordTech Communications has grown into a major force in poetry publishing with plans to publish more than 40 books in 2004. 

We also have a new addition to our Essays & Assays page, a review of Joe Ruggier's Songs of Gentlest Reflection, reviewed by Mary Rae.

We have added two new poems suggested by Dr. Edward Zuk to our Masters page, and we have moved our previous discussion of Romanticism and Romantic poetry to a new page:  Romanticism Then and Now.  This page has a new and (we hope) improved introduction to Romanticism that goes back to the very first troglodyte poet, Shrimp, and the object of his first wild stab at poetry—the lovely, impressively hairy Grunt.  In this introduction, you'll learn many earthshakingly important things, the most important being the history of the "ah!" in "stars." 

The HyperTexts is not a self-absorbed, self-contained bio-dome bulging with exotic intellectualism, as many of the (shudder) Major Literary Journals have become.  Instead of keeping our heads tucked safely inside a protective bubble, we're more inclined to go joyriding like frazzle-haired Pauly Shores, tearing all over the terrain, the more mountainous the better, in search of "new highs." The Internet is a fascinatingly convoluted webscape of connections, of connections within connections, of connections leading endlessly on to other connections.  The World Wide Web is aptly named, and doesn't lend itself to highbrow insularity.  But sometimes amidst all those circuitous connections, it's easy for a promising new web site to escape notice.  So when we find a shiny, brand-spankin'-new web site like that of The National Poetry Review, we think it worthwhile—nay!, our duty—to bring it to the attention of our readers.   TNPR is edited by  C. J. Sage, who prefers formal verse with "rich sound," truly an editor after our own hearts.   In addition to C. J. Sage, TNPR's impressive masthead includes Annie Finch, Marilyn Hacker and Molly Peacock.  Definitely a "must see."—MRB

May 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jared Carter.  Dana Gioia said of Carter's first book,  Work, for the Night Is Coming: “From beginning to end, this volume has the quiet passion of conviction, the voice of a poet who knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it.” Henry Taylor described Work, for the Night Is Coming as “one of the clearest and strongest first books to have appeared in recent decades.” Galway Kinnell obviously agreed about the merits of Work, for the Night Is Coming, awarding it the 1980 Walt Whitman award.  Carter's second book, After the Rain, attracted similar notice.  “Extraordinary,” Gioia wrote “a dark, haunting book in the tradition of Frost.”  Ted Kooser found After the Rain to be “a moving and masterful book, charming in the best sense of that word.”  It offered “proof,” according to Robert Phillips, “that the art of poetry is alive and well in America.” Robert McPhillips called it "the finest, most varied, and most rewarding volume of poetry published in 1993.”  We could go on, but we'd rather point you directly to Jared Carter's poetry page.

This month, we're also pleased to add three new poems to the poetry page of Terese Coe.  While French delicacies may currently be out of favor in certain circles, we think our readers will enjoy Terese Coe's delicate translations and interpretations of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard.  With poetry, discrimination is good thing, so please read and enjoy!

On a personal note, I'd like to apologize for the slowness with which the monthly issues of The HyperTexts have been appearing lately.  Reality intrudes, and the computer consultancy I own and operate has been demanding more and more of my time lately.   On the brighter side, although I've had precious little (and thus all the more precious) time to devote to poetry lately, I continue to see signs that interest in poetry is peaking all over the globe.  I even received an e-mail from a  Nigerian poet who said that one of my poems was "stirring up a lot of dust" among his circle of friends in Africa.  It seems they found my poems by way of Jendi Reiter's web site, which links to this site.  The Internet is all about connections, and the World Wide Web is aptly named.  Let's hope that web of connections continues to bring poets and readers together in ever-increasing numbers.  — MRB

April 2003:  Our featured poet this month is X. J. Kennedy.  Richard Moore says Kennedy is "one of the best poets we have."  Jan Schreiber says "Very little human experience is beyond the range of his keen eye and his well turned lines. We are fortunate to have him working among us."  Those of our readers who are fans of Light Quarterly, one of this editor's favorite journals, will already be well acquainted with the work of one of earth's best "unserious poets," so please be sure to thoroughly investigate his poetry page.

 . . . Okay, I simply have to interrupt my train of thought before continuing to share this delightful missive I received from Rhina Espaillat after I had asked her to preview the "perils of poetry contests" pages discussed further below.  Rhina's comments:

. . . How right you are, Rhina!  But what an enjoyable (if perplexing) task: to choose from among so many excellent poems.  (And I have to absolutely fall in love with an acclaimed Formalist poet who can gleefully exclaim:  "Good grief, this is great!")

Resuming my train of thought: I have a curious and cautionary tale to relate, one which involves an old friend,  the lovely and talented, aforementioned Rhina Espaillat, and a new-found poetic friend, Norman Kraeft.  The curiousness of the tale is its unlikely, somewhat magical ending.  The cautionary aspect of the tale is that too many poetry contests are less than ethically sound, even those run by seemingly legitimate organizations.  If you're interested, please proceed to Norman Kraeft's poetry page for the contest details and a prodigal poem that was a winner, then (through no fault of its own) an outcast, and then finally (thanks to our ever-diligent, ever-delightful Rhina), embraced as a winner again.

We've also added a new poem, "The Rusish Baths," by Zyskandar Jaimot.  "The Rusish Baths" recently appeared in Esther Cameron's excellent Neovictorian/Cochlea poetry journal.

I'd also like to mention that The HyperTexts has been working closely with the Net Poetry & Arts Competition to promote and encourage the growth of interactive poetry forums on the Internet.  NPAC, a non-profit entity under the able directorship of Michael Morton, promotes poetry and art on the Internet by sponsoring contests in which on-line forums submit their members' best work in an "amiable rivalry."  THT poet Tony Marco and I recently judged the first three NPAC poetry contests, along with Georgia Kornbluth, a poet we hope to publish if she will only send us a submission.  THT poets Jennifer Reeser and Joyce Wilson comprise two-thirds of the current panel of NPAC judges, and we've just learned that THT poets Patrick Kanouse and Harvey Stanbrough will constitute two thirds of the third NPAC panel.  Need I say that several formal poems have done well in the NPAC contests, or that many, many young poets are embracing the forms and devices of traditional English poetry?  Younger poets seem to more and more enthralled with the history and traditions of poetry, and I believe there is a groundswell of popular interest in meter, rhyme and form.  As I've mentioned on this page in the past, there are multiple poetry sites with hundreds of thousand of visitors per month, and any poet still intoning the tired mantra that poetry has lost its readership is, in my opinion, simply mumbling aloud yesterday's irrelevant news.  Poetry is once again a popular art, and if that doesn't suit the tedious academics, the language poets, the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Projectivists, and the various "Movements" (akin, I like to think, to those of runny bowels), well, so much the better. —MRB

March 2003:  Our featured poet this month is R. S. Gwynn.  Dana Gioia has called him "one of the truly talented and original poets of my generation," praising his "depth of feeling and intense lyricality."  Richard Wilbur says: "R. S. Gwynn's No Word of Farewell is ... a richly varied, highly accomplished collection from one of our best."  X. J. Kennedy says: "A wonderful satirist, a master translator, a keen observer of ironies, Gwynn commands a wide range of forms, some of them daunting in their difficulty.  Moreover, he clearly holds with the ancient wisdom that a poem ought to bring gladness.  That is why, every time I spy one of his new poems in a magazine, I read it before anything else."  On that note, we suggest that you do as Mr. Kennedy does, and without further ado, let us direct you to R. S. Gwynn's poetry page.  This month, we're also pleased to publish poems by Terese Coe.  Her work includes her own delightfully original poetry and a translation from Pierre de Ronsard.  We continue to feature the work of the great Romantic poets and their literary heirs on our Masters page, while Esther Cameron's "The World's Last Rose" remains our featured work.

Also, we'd like to announce the debut of a new literary web site, the home page of The Eclectic Muse. The Eclectic Muse is edited by February's featured poet, Joe M. Ruggier, a poet who has worked tirelessly to promote our kind (and we hope your kind) of poetry:  poetry that sings and moves, poetry that embraces rather than denies or defies the traditions of English poetry.  If you believe as Joe Ruggier does—that there is a revival of traditional poetry, and that the world is better place for it—then we think you'll find The Eclectic Muse well worth the price of a subscription.—MRB

February 2003:  Our featured poet this month is Joe M. Ruggier, a man who has done something to make all bewailers of the "state of the art" of contemporary poetry take note, having sold over 20,000 books, many of them door-to-door, including over 10,000 books he wrote and published himself!  Now that's something even Robert Ripley would find truly amazing.  We encourage our readers and poets not only to visit Joe's poetry page, but also to support him in his efforts to, as it were, singlehandedly jumpstart the revival of traditional English poetry.  Joe was born in Malta and now lives in Richmond, Canada, where in addition to writing English and Maltese poetry and outselling most "major" poetry presses by himself,  he is also a literary critic and editor who publishes a fine poetry journal, The Eclectic Muse.  As if that isn't enough, Joe has translated the poetry of the Maltese poet George Borg.  He's truly a man of many talents (and many hats!).  Also this month, we've added a new featured work to the pages of The HyperTexts:  just in time for Valentine's day, we're delighted to bring you Esther Cameron's "The World's Last Rose," a love poem of a poetic nature to Paul Celan.  And what better month than February to revisit the work of the great Romantic poets, so on our Masters page we're featuring the work of a number of Romantic poets, from William Blake and Robert Burns to Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, and we've also included two darkly romantic poems by a perhaps unlikely candidate, Robert Frost.  In the necessarily humble opinion of this editor, Frost's "Acquainted With The Night" and "Directive" are far darker, more chilling and disturbing, and simply better than anything written by Poe.—MRB

January 2003:  Our featured poet this month is Emery Campbell.  Emery, in addition to being a talented poet, fiction writer and translator, is active in the Georgia Poetry Society and, like many of the poets who breathe life into the pages of The HyperTexts, is contributing to the current renaissance of traditional poetry by actively encouraging the efforts of other poets.  If you like witty poetry and metrical/rhymed poetry, you'll doubly like the poetry of Emery Campbell.  Also, at  Emery's request, we've added two new poems to our Masters page:  "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (of which Emery says, "I find it one of the most poignant and powerful poems I have ever read.")  and "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, a  Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who died in action at the age of 19 on December 11, 1941.

As the editor of The HyperTexts, one of my great pleasures is that I get to chat with poets from all corners of the globe.  Of late, I've had several interesting conversations with Esther Cameron, a talented poet and the editor of The Neovictorian/Cochlea.   Although our backgrounds are remarkably different, we seem to have a lot in common when it comes to poetry, and I'd like to congratulate Esther on the latest issue of NV/C (Vol. VI, No. 2), which contains a variety of poetic styles and flavors and has earned kudos from "men in the know" like Joseph Salemi and John Morgan.   In particular, I liked "The Rushish Baths" by Zyskandar Jaimot, "Mary" by Joe Ruggier, "Yuppies and Their Beepers" by Joseph Salemi, Esther's own "Liaison," Gail White's "The Piercing Truth," and several others, ... and as I read, I found myself wondering:  where else lately have I seen such a nicely esoteric blend of free verse (even a prose poem), formal forms, and a bit of everything in between?  If you don't already subscribe to NV/C, you really ought to buy a copy of the current issue, which you can do by contacting Esther via e-mail or snail mail.  Her contact information is on her THT poetry page, which we've just updated with two new poems written about her recent travels in Israel, one of which is the aforementioned "Liaison."

Another poet I've enjoyed swapping e-mails with is Richard Moore.  As anyone who visits this page regularly knows by now, I'm a fan of Richard's poetry, and it seems that I'm constantly finding new poems of his (or at least poems of his that are new to me) and asking him for permission to use them for THT.  I don't consider myself a critic of poets, just an avid reader of poetry, but if I had to take a stab at naming poets in my ever-widening circle who might come to be highly valued by future generations, Richard Moore would be my first choice.  As the editor of THT, I've never subscribed to the "less is more" thing.  Instead, I think to myself "best is more," and so we've added three new poems to Richard Moore's poetry page:  two that were published recently in Romantics Quarterly, and one that was the lead poem in the most current issue of Edge City Review,  a fine journal edited by Terry Ponick, and one that should be on everyone's reading list.—MRB

December 2002: Our featured poet this month is Jennifer Reeser.  The featured poet on our Masters page is Elizabeth Bishop.  We have also updated Jendi Reiter's poetry page with a picture and information about her first book, A Talent for Sadness.  Our congratulations on the book, Jendi!  The featured essay on our Essays and Assays page is Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?"  We have also added a Essays and Assays link to Gioia's follow-up to his essay, titled "Hearing from Poetry's Audience."  Gioia's comments about the response to "Can Poetry Matter?" are  interesting:  "Letters poured into The Atlantic, copies of which they shipped to me in thick bundles.  Other mail came to me directly or through my publishers.  Reporters phoned at the office for interviews.  Newspaper and magazine articles appeared.  Radio producers asked me to discuss the article on the air.  Friends phoned with anecdotes about the article's impact.  Strangers called to ask advice.  And for months the mail continued.  Eventually I received over 400 letters from Atlantic readers. They were overwhelmingly favorable.  Many of them felt I had not gone far enough in criticizing the inbred nature of the poetry world."  Fascinating stuff, and we think Dana Gioia is an excellent, excellent choice for the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. 

November 2002: Our featured poet this month is Harvey Stanbrough, who was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and the 2000 Frankfurt Award.  Our newest Contemporary Poet is Jendi Reiter, a most welcome addition.  We've also added a new poem/song lyric, "Annette's Song," to Tony Marco's poetry page, and we've also added an interview with Tony to our Essays & Assays page. Correcting a longstanding oversight, we've added a picture of Jan Schreiber to his poetry page.  Also, while we're trying to obtain the rights to publish Steve Kowit's timely essay, "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem," here's a link for anyone who wonders, as we often do, why Harold Bloom's critical libido is stirred at the merest whiff of cognitive difficulty.  Oh, and by the way—our poets were paid a well-earned compliment by Michael Morton, Director of the Net Poetry and Arts Competition, who recently said:  "As I told one of our members, The HyperTexts reads like a 'Who's Who' in contemporary poetry today!"  Our sentiments exactly!

A link we think you will find of particular interest is Triplopia. Triplopia is edited by Gene Justice and Tara Eliot, and currently features poetry by THT poet Zyskandar Jaimot and  an interview with THT editor Michael R. Burch.  If you want to know what makes THT "tick," this interview reveals the inner workings of our editor's mind, which is always busy, but hardly a precision instrument. 

October 2002: Our featured poet this month, Leo Yankevich, speaks to us all the way from Gliwice, Poland, while  Essays & Assays features Esther Cameron's thought-provoking essay "I, Human" and two essays by Richard Moore:  "The Balancer:  Yeats and His Supernatural System" and "Poetic Meter in English: Roots and Possibilities."   We've also put a few finishing touches on Richard Moore's poetry page, which is one readers should revisit often.  And we've added two new poems to Gail White's page:  poems that will mercilessly tickle our readers' funnybones.  The first poem will remind you of someone you know (perhaps even of poets who've appeared in these pages!).  The second will pepper you with sage advice.  These are "must reads," folks.  By the way, our featured poet wears at least two hats:  Leo Yankevich and David Castleman are co-editors of Mandrake Poetry Review,  an attractive poetry site chock-full of excellent contemporary metrical poetry.  Mandrake Poetry Review  is a definite "must see."  There is also a printed flat-spined paperback anthology, which includes all material from the web issues published in a given year, and we highly recommend a subscription.  Details are on the MPR website, which is only a mouseclick away.  Finally, we've added a new poem, "The Watch," to Michael R. Burch's poetry page at the request of Triplopia (on-line at www.triplopia.com) in preparation for an on-line interview Triplopia editor Gene Justice will be conducting with Mike:  Triplopia wanted to be able to hyperlink to the poem, which Mike suspects is a polite way of saying, "We don't mind talking about your poetry, but we wouldn't want to actually publish it!"

September 2002: Our featured poet this month is Gail White.  Also, this month we're pleased to showcase the poetry of Deborah Warren in our Contemporary Poets section.  And in our continuing attempt to refute the modern adage "less is more," contending that if the words are good enough, we'd rather have more, not less, we've also added five new poems by Richard Moore: ones you'd be amiss to miss.  We've also added a number of poems to our Masters page, and this month we're featuring some of the best love poems of all time, from poets like Roethke, Jonson, Auden, Yeats, Herrick, Bishop and Bogan.   Our congratulations to Rhina Espaillat, whose latest book Rehearsing Absence was reviewed (positively, of course) in the September issue of Poetry.  Rhina has a problem to which most poets secretly aspire:  she's been the topic of so much interest and discussion recently, that, in response to her on-line interview with Poetic Reflections being delayed, she expressed relief, saying, "I don't want readers/viewers to say, 'What, HER again???'"  Is that a twinge of empathy we're feeling, or is it the sting of envy?  We've also updated our Links page, adding two new sites of interest:  Erosha (if you're not averse to well-done erotica, this site has both stunning visuals and titillating poetry) and Little Brown Poetry [alas, since and so soon defunct—hence the dead link], an excellent on-line poetry journal and web site edited by Sam Siegel; the September 2002 issue leads off with a traditionally-flavored poem by Banjo Moore.  As always, we're encouraged to see journals that publish mostly free verse now accepting traditional forms as well.  It seems the poetic world may finally be awakening from its long nightmare of "reverse discrimination."  Or perhaps it's simply that poetry journals have become more discriminating.  To quote Jon Lovitz, "Yeah, that's the ticket!"

August 2002:  This month's featured poet is Zyskandar A. Jaimot.  Our thanks to Noah Hoffenberg, poet and editor of CRUX Literary Magazine, for bringing the poetry of Mr. Jaimot to our attention.  Which leads us to thanking Richard Moore for putting us in touch with Mr. Hoffenberg, whose poetry now appears in our Contemporary Poets section.  We owe a second round of thanks to Richard Moore for pointing us toward Richard Wakefield, whose poetry also appears under Contemporary Poets, as does that of Jack Butler, who also has a selection of essays on our Essays & Assays page.  This month, we've updated our Masters page with poems by Auden, Bishop, Bogan, Baudelaire and Keats, with the latter's poem being suggested to us by Esther Cameron.  (Thanks Esther.)  We've also updated Patrick Kanouse's page with a picture and two new poems.  Patrick is the editor of The Raintown Review, stepping into the position previously held by Harvey Stanbrough.  The Raintown Review is a champion of metrical poetry in general and blank verse in particular, so please be sure to support both Mr. Kanouse and his journal with your subscriptions and your submissions.

July 2002:  We're running behind on publishing a number of new poets (new to THT, but names many of our visitors will immediately recognize, although we also have a few surprises up our sleeves).  Our apologies for the delays, but please console yourselves with our editor's promise that your wait will eventually be worth his weight in gold (discounting, of course, his feet of clay.)  In the meantime, we've added a new page we think will be of interest:  Essays & Assays.  Here, you'll find interviews and essays  on "things poetic."  We hope to soon add roundtable discussions in which poets scream and pull out their hair debating mindbending things like what the hell "free verse"  means, and whether Joseph Salemi has been teaching American Idol's Simon Cowell a few tricks.

June 2002:  Our featured poet is Leslie Mellichamp, for the second month.  We continue to receive poems and testimonials in the honor of a poet and editor we greatly admired.  So please revisit this month's updated Featured Poet page.  We have also added a number of poems to our Masters page, and our thanks to Gail White and Zyskandar Jaimot for suggesting the poems debuting at the head of the Masters page this month.  Both Ms. White and Mr. Jaimot will be featured poets in upcoming issues of THT.  Also, thanks to Allen Heinrich, editor of Carnelian, for two poems ("Exile" by Hart Crane and "No Other Troy" by William Butler Yeats) we "lifted" from his excellent poetry web site.  You can find Carnelian, which has published poetry by THT poets Harvey Stanbrough and Jack Granath, on our Links page.  In our defense, T. S. Eliot did say, "Mature poets steal."

Editor's Note:  It's interesting how in poetry one thing leads to another.  When Zyskandar Jaimot suggested Lord Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," noting that it is one of the best-cadenced poems in the English language, I immediately thought of one of my favorite Tennyson poems, the lovely and haunting "Mariana."  Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon "Exile" while browsing the latest issue of Carnelian, and it struck me that this is another lovely, haunting poem with which all readers of poetry should become intimately familiar.   And yet I suspect that less than one percent of all literate Americans have read either of these poems.  The percentage of readers who have read both poems is probably astoundingly small.  If you know anyone who might enjoy and benefit from reading these poems, please e-mail them our URL (www.thehypertexts.com) forthwith! —MRB

May 2002:  Our featured poet is Leslie Mellichamp, whose death on December 18, 2001 leaves a void poetry will be hard pressed to fill.  As the editor of The Lyric, the oldest magazine in North America devoted to traditional poetry, he was one of the standard bearers of accessible metrical poetry when its future seemed, at times, in doubt.   In those lean years of the not-too-far-distant past, if a poet had a nice sonnet or villanelle that was languishing unpublished, The Lyric was always a bright prospect:  a lighthouse, a star.  We are pleased to be able to share Leslie Mellichamp's poetry with you, and if you have a personal testimonial you would like to have added to his poetry page, please e-mail it to Michael R. Burch at mburch@aocg.com.  We're also pleased to introduce you to the poetry of Hudson Owen, who appears in our Contemporary Poets section.  To show what a small poetic world it is, and also the esteem in which Leslie Mellichamp's journal is held, Hudson Owen listed The Lyric first among his publication credits.  Many poets have done the same throughout the years.  Also, we've added a new poem by Tony Marco, "Sabillasville Sonnet 3."  And we've updated Rhina Espaillat's bio:  she now has four books, including Rehearsing Absence, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award.  Congratulations, Rhina!  

March 2002:  Our featured poet is A. M. Juster.  We have also added Wendy Taylor Carlisle to our Contemporary Poets section.  We have a fine slate of poets who will be added next month, including Jack Butler, Noah Hoffenberg, Hudson Owen, Deborah Warren and Richard Wakefield.  We continue to be encouraged by the publication of accessible metrical poetry in journals like Poetry, Harvard Review (which recently used a poem by THT poet Joyce Wilson), Atlanta Review, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, and many others.  And we're greatly encouraged by the fact that several poetry sites now attract thousands of visitors each month.  Web sites like www.poets.org and www.ablemuse.com continue to grow and thrive.  But there are thousands of poetry sites that are flourishing, and there is incredible demand for poetry on the Internet.  For instance, "poetry" was recently the number eight search term for an entire year on Lycos, ahead of "football," "golf," "wrestling" and most of the "sex kittens."  Amazing, but true.  Yahoo! had to cancel an on-line poetry bash due to overwhelming demand, and Yahoo! has pretty decent broadcast capabilities.  In an attempt to get the word out about "our kind" of poets to an increasingly attentive world, THT editor Michael R. Burch will be conducting a series of monthly interviews for Poetic Reflections.  Each month, starting in April, we'll provide a URL to the current interview.  The first interview will be with Richard Moore, one of our favorite contemporary poets, time and schedules permitting, so please "stay tuned!"

February 2002:  Our featured poet is Rhina P. Espaillat.  We have also added Anton N. (Tony) Marco to our Contemporary Poets section, and Tony will be the featured poet in an upcoming issue of The HyperTexts.  There is one major change to our format:  we have consolidated the poems of the Masters onto one page.  We did this to make it easier for visitors to find our Contemporary Poets pages.  We have also updated our Links page; there are now several outstanding Formalist poetry sites which appear early in our listings.  Speaking of links, we were paid a wonderful compliment by Chris Beaulieu, editor of Poetic Reflections.  Chris decided to cull his links down to the best three, and THT made the cut.  Since Poetic Reflections itself was named one of the top three poetry web sites by none other than Writer's Digest, we were obviously quite pleased.  We were even more pleased when Chris noted that the content of THT is "awesome."  On another note, professor Kevin N. Roberts, editor of Romantics Quarterly, is looking for traditional poetry that shows the influence of the great Romantic Poets.  If you're interested in submitting to Romantics Quarterly, please contact Michael R. Burch at mburch@aocg.com. 

January 2002:  Our featured poet is Jan Schreiber.  We have completely revamped the Contemporary Poets section to make it easier to find the poets.  Contemporary Poets are now listed alphabetically.  In the past, we had tried to maintain groupings (Formalist, New Romantic, Free Verse), but as our roster of poets has grown, the lines of distinction have blurred, however pleasingly, and an alphabetized list will probably be easier on both our visitors and the editor, who became famous (or is it infamous?) for not being able to decide who went where with the old method.  Also, due to popular demand (or at least an occasional inquiry), you can now find the editor's picture by clicking here.  In the February version of THT, we hope to combine the Masters into one page, which will push the Featured Poet and Contemporary Poet sections toward the top of the index.

December 2001:  Our featured poet is Claudia Gary Annis.  We have updated our Rock Jukebox Page, and we hope you'll check it out.  We are adding a number of excellent Contemporary Poets in the near future, including George Amabile,  Anton (Tony) Marco, Hudson Owen, and Jan Schreiber, so please visit us again soon!

November 2001:  Our featured poet is Richard Moore.  We have updated our Links Page to show the THT poets who have been published by the various poetry journals and web sites listed.   We also want to congratulate Mary Rae for winning the first prize in the first annual Raintown Review Awards poetry contest, which was jointly sponsored by THT.   A special note of congratulation is in order to THT poet Joseph S. Salemi, who was the only poet to have two poems among the finalists.  Also, THT poet Michael R. Burch won the Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest, sponsored by Romantics Quarterly, with Carmen Willcox finishing second and Mary Rae the first runner up.

Prior to November 2001: Our first featured poet was Richard Moore, as noted above. Prior to November 1, THT didn't have issues, per se, and was not updated on a monthly basis, but merely upon the caprice of its founder and editor (i.e. me, Mike Burch). When did THT start? I don't rightly remember! But I was able to use the Wayback Machine to find the earliest extant version of THT, circa March 2001. At that time we had separate pages for the Masters, and they were Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Ernest Dowson, Robert Frost, A. E. Housman, Ben Jonson, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilfred Owen, E. A. Robinson, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, and W. B. Yeats. Our first cadre of contemporary poets included Harvey Stanbrough, Annie Finch, A. E. Stallings (the first "big fish" we landed), Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, William F. Carlson, Jennifer Reeser, Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, and Michael R. Burch. From April to October 2001 we added the following contemporary poets: Roger Hecht, Louise Jaffe, Esther Cameron, Jack Granath, Carmen Willcox, Dr. Alfred Dorn, Wade Newman, Patrick Kanouse, Joyce Wilson, Mary Rae (the winner of our first and only poetry contest), Ric Masten and Ursula T. Gibson. In the early days, Bill Carlson was a godsend, as he put us in touch, either directly or indirectly through his website and its links to Expansive Poetry & Music Online, with roughly half the poets we published in our formative days: himself, Dorn, Salemi, Cameron, Newman, Hecht (via Newman, his literary executor), Jaffe, Granath, Reeser and Richard Moore. The second largest "pool" of poets came from to us from the ranks of the New Romantics: Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, Carmen Willcox and Mary Rae. We found Harvey Stanbrough through The Raintown Review, which he founded and was still editing at the time. Some poets we found through the "grapevine" and the Internet: Stallings, Finch, Wilson, Masten, Gibson. We found Kanouse either through Carlson or Stanbrough.

Just when was The HyperTexts originally created? I'm not sure. Probably between 1998 and 2000, since the site already had considerable content in early 2001, with a total of 21 poets in its Masters and Contemporary Poets indexes, not to mention fairly extensive Esoterica and Rock Jukebox pages. In July 2004 we recorded our hit counter for the first time: 16,787. But I don't remember when I added it, so any number of early hits were probably not recorded. In four months of 2008 alone, THT had around 30,000 hits on its main page. So our readership has obviously grown dramatically. We seem to get as many hits in four months as we once did in four years.

Why did I start The HyperTexts? Again, I really don't remember. I know I bought a copy of Microsoft Frontpage, the program I used to create THT, probably just before the turn of century, in order to edit the website of the software company I own, Alpha Omega Consulting Group, Inc. At the time Alpha Omega had a programmer, Steve Harris, who had experience designing websites, so I imagine I bought the program on his recommendation. Steve left Alpha Omega toward the end of 2000, so I suppose around that time I had to take over editing the company website. So perhaps I created THT in order to learn the basics of HTML. It would have been natural for me to create a literary website, as a way of learning my way around HTML, because whenever I needed to learn a new programming language, I always started with something functional that I had the expertise to design and critique. I doubt that I had any real intention of being an editor and publisher of poetry at the time. I do remember getting in contact with A. E. (Alicia) Stallings and asking if I could publish a few of her poems. Her graciousness no doubt encouraged me to "go after" other poets. Annie Finch and Harvey Stanbrough were other poets I admired who gave me permission to publish  their poems. Through my connection with Michael Pendragon, who published my poems in the literary journals Penny Dreadful and Songs of Innocence and the poetry anthology The Bible of Hell, I met Kevin N. Roberts, the founder and editor of Romantics Quarterly. As I helped Kevin get Romantics Quarterly off the ground, with financial assistance and suggestions, I began to see something of a larger role for myself, in the grand scheme of things, and THT soon became a launching pad of sorts for literary journals on tight budgets that didn't have their own websites. Those were the days before every man and his dog had a blog.

In 2002 I published Rhina Espaillat, and over the years she has helped THT publish the work of a number of her fellow Powow River Poets, including Michael Cantor, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Mike Juster and Midge Goldberg.

In 2002 I published Jack Butler, the first poet in an "Arkansas connection" that now includes Jack, Greg Alan Brownderville, Jim Barnes, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn.

In early 2003 I ran free advertisements for Joe Ruggier's literary journal, The Eclectic Muse, and for his collection of books on CD, which my software company helped Joe create. My relationship with Joe soon led THT to join forces with Joe's Multicultural Books (MBooks) imprint, and before long we had published books by Emery Campbell, Zyskandar Jaimot, T. Merrill and V. Ulea, with hopefully more to come.

Also in 2003 I published Yala Korwin, a Holocaust survivor, and soon with the help of Yala and Esther Cameron, THT was able to bring a number of poems by Jewish ghetto poets and other Holocaust poets that had never appeared in English before. Our early Holocaust pages included those of Janusz Korczak and Elie Wiesel, which were published in 2004. 

In 2005, I published the work of T. (Tom) Merrill, and this was the beginning of yet another fruitful relationship. Tom has devoted much time to THT, and he is now our Poet in Residuum. In addition to gracing our pages with his poems, essays and poet intros, Tom is a proofreader par excellence. And he has directed us to a number of poets we wouldn't have known about otherwise, including Agnes Wathall, Eunice de Chazeau and Mary Malone.

In 2006, I published the poetry of Jeffery Woodward, and he has gone on to contribute a number of pages to our "Blasts from the Past" series, earning a honorable mention on our masthead. And so THT's editors and associates now consist of me, Tom, Joe and Jeffrey.

As I pen this retrospective (written on December 12, 2008), THT ranks in the top ten with Google for a number of our primary search terms: the hypertexts (#1), hypertexts (#2), formal poetry (#2), contemporary formal poetry (#3), "the Masters" poetry (#2), Darfur poetry (#1), Holocaust poetry (#10), ghetto poets (#2), Nelson Mandela poetry (#1), Elie Wiesel poetry (#1), Leonard Nimoy poetry (#1), Ronald Reagan poetry (#1), Pope John Paul II poetry (#1), Karol Wojtyla poetry (#1), Nadia Anjuman poetry (#1 and #2), Miklós Radnóti poetry (#1), Formalist poetry (#5). And we're ranked extremely high by Google for searches for many of the poets we've published: X. J. Kennedy poetry (#1), Richard Moore poetry (#1 and #2), Esther Cameron poetry (#1 and #2), George Held poetry (#1), Jack Butler poetry (#3 and #4), Ethna Carbery poetry (#3), etc.

In a few cases, such as Richard Moore's and Esther Cameron's, we even rank above the poets' personal and/or literary websites. And in many cases, we rank number one with Google in searches for our poets' names, sans modifiers, as with Eunice de Chazeau, Alfred Dorn, Rhina P. Espaillat, Roger Hecht, George Held, T. S. Kerrigan, Yala Korwin, Leslie Mellichamp, Robert Mezey, Joseph S. Salemi, and Agnes Wathall, just to drop a few names. These are men and women with serious accomplishments, so it's interesting to see THT ranking number one, even above Wikipedia, as we sometimes do.

Where will THT go from here? Perhaps as high and far as Google can help us fly . . .

I just noticed that THT doesn't rank as high for "Abraham Lincoln poetry" as I would prefer, so I'm off to see what I and Google can do about that . . . even the best of marriages involve disagreements from time to time.

Mike Burch
December 12, 2008

The HyperTexts