The HyperTexts

What are The HyperTexts? Where do we find the most intense, the most highly charged works in the English language?

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

If it arouses your curiosity that A. E. Housman was able to capture something essential about war, death, youth, honor and humanity in two perfect sentences, perhaps The HyperTexts is a site you'll enjoy exploring.

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

Seamus Heaney describes "The Forge" so that we can see and hear it: the bright flurry of sparks that never cool or blur, the twang of iron that reverberates forever. This is poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "best words in their best order," in an electronic format: The HyperTexts. We encourage you to explore our web site. These pages are inlaid with the near-flawless gems of the masters and the paler, still-coalescing pearls of contemporary poets. There are names you will recognize and those you have never heard before: each a unique, compelling voice.  Each, we believe, well worth the price of admission, which is simply your time.

We hope you'll visit the poets listed under The Masters and the Spotlight Poets, Featured Poets, Contemporary Poets and other poets and artists in the index on the left. If you've visited The HyperTexts before, you can quickly catch up on "what's new and improved" by checking out our Current & Back Issues page. For more detailed information about The HyperTexts, please see the Site Guide below.

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Site Guide

Current & Back Issues is the place to go to quickly see what's new, improved and changed on our other pages. If you have visited The HyperTexts before, this is the best place to quickly "catch up" on our latest shenanigans.

The Masters contains poems by all-time greats like William Shakespeare, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost. This extensive page also features the passionate, highly musical poetry of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, the ever-precise lyrics of Elizabeth Bishop, and the work of a number of less-well-known but nonetheless-essential poets like Ernest Dowson and Louise Bogan. 

Our Spotlight Poets, Featured Poets, Contemporary Poets, Holocaust Poets, Foreign/Translation Poets, Contemporary Artists, New Romantics, Blasts from the Past, and our Editors/Associates can all be found in the index on the left. Every month, although not always as inevitably as clockwork, The HyperTexts spotlights the work of one or more contemporary poets and artists, along with occasional "Blasts from the Past."

Featured Works is a page devoted to longer works of poetry and literature that may have been given short shrift elsewhere.

Mysterious Ways is a page devoted to poetry, art and literature that deals with "things mysterious," including, but not limited to, questions of God, eternity, death and the afterlife. 

In Peace's Arms (Not War's) is a page dedicated to the poetic proposition that Peace's arms are more desirable than War's. This page highlights poetry from all over the globe, with an emphasis on the poetry of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Esoterica contains poems by Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Elie Wiesel, Ronald Reagan and Ernest Hemingway, comments about poetry and art by Plato, Goya and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and a highly illuminating, high-wattage collection of poetry excerpts, quotes, quips, trivia and anecdotes. And for good measure, we even have poetry and literary prose pages dedicated to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) and Elie Wiesel.

Essays & Assays contains essays and articles on "things poetic" and other themes, including a series of essays by Elie Wiesel and the landmark essay "Can Poetry Matter" by Dana Gioia, along with a series of poet interviews conducted by THT editor Michael R. Burch. Essays & Assays also features a goodly number of book reviews.

Rock Jukebox features lyrics by songwriters like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Harry Chapin, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Grace Notes poses the question: Grace, what is it?, then uses the investigative method of T. S. Eliot: Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.

Thanksgiving is a perennial page whose full title is self-explanatory: Thanksgiving and the Autumnal Paradox in Poetry, Literature, Song, and Prayer.

A Dram of Epigrams offers "short and sweet" doses of wisdom.

Wit and Fluff is humor at its most poetic, or least prosaic.

Search allows you to quickly scan our pages for a specific keyword or keywords. 

Links is an interactive launching pad that will rocket you at webspeed to some of the best poetry sites on the Internet.  We're always open to exchanging reciprocal links with the better poetry sites out there, so if you have one you particularly like, please let us know.

Contemporary Poets/Artists can be found in the index on the left. The HyperTexts has published the work of two Pulitzer Prize nominees alongside poems by poets who have won the Richard Wilbur, T. S. Eliot and Howard Nemerov awards, not to mention many other accolades. The work of these outstanding poets appears regularly in leading journals like The Atlantic, The Formalist, Light Quarterly, The Lyric, The New Formalist, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Pivot, Edge City Review, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Eclectic Muse, Mandrake Poetry Review and Poetry. 

What We Are, and What We're Not

Many of the labels applied to poets and poetry, and the baggage they trundle awkwardly behind them, are truly unfortunate. Is Richard Wilbur a Formal poet, a Formalist, a New Formalist, or simply a poet? If Percy Bysshe Shelley is a Romantic poet, does that mean Robert Frost is not a Romantic poet? Reading Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" or "Directive," one might easily conclude that Frost, the famously pragmatic New Englander, was more darkly romantic than realized by those who would take him simply (or is it simple-mindedly?) "at face value." The best poets are far too deep, far too complex, for the convenient Post-It labels the world slaps on them. Which begs the question: with so many poets writing in so many styles, with so many influences, and with so many poets so intriguingly original and delightfully hard to pin down, what conclusions can we draw about contemporary poetry in general, or about a small, insignificant poetry web site specifically? Can we say that The HyperTexts is a Formal Poetry site, a Formalist Poetry site, a New Formalist Poetry site, a Romantic Poetry site, a New Romantic Poetry site, an Expansive Poetry site, or should we perhaps invent a new label to make it sound more exotic? Or by doing so, do we only end up adding to the general neurosis?

Today, poetry exists in a state approximating schizophrenia: the Modernists and Postmodernists rail against the backwardness of the traditional poetic devices of form, meter and rhyme; the Formalists grumble at the looseness and laxness of free verse; everyone has a favorite maxim: "less is more," "no ideas but in things," and so on. But there is no getting away from the all-too-obvious-but-often-ignored fact that poetry has always been an esoteric blend of the old and the new. T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential of the Modernists, said "Mature poets steal," and proceeded to do so, often admirably, robbing the cradle of literature in the process. Ezra Pound said "Make it new," then proceeded to write as if through a time warp wormholing back to the Big Bang of the English language. Eliot either didn't believe much of what he said about writing poetry, or belonged to the "do as I say, not as I do" school of instruction. And then he penned the light-hearted, musical poems that Andrew Lloyd Webber morphed into "Cats!" Pound flitted from Imagism to Vorticism (?) and didn't seem particularly impressed with the results of either. William Carlos Williams and his literary heirs seemed to fixate on imagery as some sort of poetic cure-all for a centuries-long literary hangover, but the Metaphysical poets Eliot favored might have made a chiasmus out of Williams' famous adage, retorting: "No things but in ideas." The rate of change soon accelerated to such a degree that Charles Olson wrote off Pound and Williams as "inferior predecessors" when the ink was barely dry on their best poems, opining that poetry is an "energy discharge", a "projectile," leaving us, we assume, with Projectivism as a great leap forward over Vorticism (?), a term from which I cannot unhinge my question mark.

So what are poets and readers to make of all this, and how does the editor of an on-line poetry journal like The HyperTexts go about his job? Can we find an appropriate label for what we publish; do we need such a label, even if one exists? I'm reminded of a comment by Donald Allen that labels can be "more historical than actual," and I'm not a fan of labels or formulas when it comes to my life's passion. A more interesting question than what to label poetry is: what exactly is poetry? An editor who moonlights as a poet should be able to hazard a guess. I have come to the utterly unamazing, highly unoriginal conclusion that poetry first has to pass the ear test: if it doesn't tickle and please the ear, "it ain't poetry." And so The HyperTexts doesn't publish poetry that reads like prose. But we do publish free verse, if it sings and speaks to us.

And no, we're not a Formalist or New Formalist poetry site, although many of the poets we publish are Formalists we respect and admire. Nor are we a Romantic or New Romantic poetry site, although we have published poets with such credentials. As the editor of The HyperTexts, I simply try to find and publish the best poems available to me--poems that sing to me and that also speak to something essential within me, poems that touch a common chord, excite it, set it vibrating, astir.  Poetry should be stirring; it should resonate; it should be memorable. (One tremendous advantage rhymed metrical poetry has over prose is that it can far more easily be remembered.) And these stirrings and their resulting echoes have more to do with sound than sense. Once poetry has charmed and captured our ears, it can then proceed to work its inimitable, inevitable magic through epiphany, metaphor, symbolism, and other mysterious alchemies more difficult to name. As Frost said, "Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom." One might also say that "poetry delights us into wisdom."

Much of the magic of modern poetry resides in the forms and patterns one sees emerging from the hard labor of the 20th century and the birth pangs of the 21st: forms and patterns we instantly recognize: sonnets, villanelles, rondels, triolets, sestinas, odes, ballads, blank verse. But we also find the musical prose of the King James Bible and Shakespeare reborn in the free verse heirs of poets like Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. In trying to explain my editorial philosophy and simultaneously describe my impression of the lovely but enigmatic modern Muse, I'm inclined to misquote Shakespeare:

Nothing of Her that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

If you read this far, thanks, but by now you should have been reading the poetry. Shoo, then!

Michael R. Burch, Editor
mburch@aocg.com

More information on contemporary poets and artists we have featured: included on our pages are some of the brightest names in contemporary arts and literature, including David Alpaugh, George Amabile, Nadia Anjuman, Claudia Gary Annis, David Gwilym Anthony, Mahnaz Badihian, Helen Bar-Lev, Jim Barnes, Michael Bennett, Luis Berriozabal, James Bobrick, Beverly Burch, Jack Butler, Greg Alan Brownderville, Debbie Amirault Camelin, Esther Cameron, Emery Campbell, Maureen Cannon , Michael Cantor, Jo-Anne Cappeluti, Ethna Carbery, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, William F. Carlson, Jared Carter, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Edmund Conti, Bill Coyle, Robert W. Crawford, Mary Cresswell, Ralph O. Cunningham, Eunice de Chazeau, Alfred Dorn, Yelena Dubrovina, Tara A. Elliot, Rhina P. Espaillat, Anna Evans, Jerzy Ficowski, Annie Finch, Charles Fishman, Jack Foley, Freddy Niagara Fonseca, Makoto Fujimura, Christopher T. George, Ursula T. Gibson, Midge Goldberg, Jack Granath, Max Gutmann, R. S. Gwynn, Eve Anthony Hanninen, Karen J. Harlow, Roger Hecht, Laura Heidy, George Held, R. Nemo Hill, Robin Ouzman Hislop, Jeff Holt, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Noah Hoffenberg, Keith Holyoak, Melanie Houle, Martin Itzkowitz, Louise Jaffe, Zyskandar Jaimot, Leland Jamieson, Judy Jones, A. M. (Mike) Juster, Julie Kane, Patrick Kanouse, Rose Kelleher, Sheema Kalbasi, X. J. (Joe) Kennedy, Janet Kenny, T. S. Kerrigan, Andrey Kneller, Janusz Korczak, Yala Korwin, June Kysilko Kraeft, Norman Kraeft, Len Krisak, Michele Leavitt, David Leightty, J. Patrick Lewis, Ellaraine Lockie, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mary Malone, Nelson Mandela, Anton N. (Tony) Marco, Ric Masten, Harold Grier McCurdy, Michael McClintock, Mary Keelan Meisel, Salomon N. Meisels, Leslie Mellichamp, T. (Tom) Merrill, Robert Mezey, Mary E. Moore, Richard Moore, Moore Moran, John Morgan, W. Riley Munday,  Oliver Murray, Wade Newman, Alfred Nicol, Leonard Nimoy, Ashok Niyogi, Hudson Owen, Christina Pacosz, Lee Passarella, Pope John Paul II, Michael Pendragon, Simon Perchik, Noam D. Plum, Miklós Radnóti, A'isha Esha Rafeeq-Swan, Mary Rae, Gordon Ramel, Carolyn Raphael, Ronald Reagan, Jennifer Reeser, Jendi Reiter, Tom Riley,  Kevin N. Roberts, Joe M. Ruggier, Joseph S. Salemi, Luis Omar Salinas, Jan Schreiber, Norman R. Shapiro, Johnmichael Simon, Lee Slonimsky, Mike Snider, A. E. (Alicia) Stallings, Harvey Stanbrough, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Takashi “Thomas” Tanemori, Sean M. Teaford, C. L. (Cynthia) Toups, CarrieAnn Thunell, V. Ulea, Richard Vallance, Wendy Videlock, Bronislawa Wajs ("Papusza"), Richard Wakefield, Kevin Walzer, Deborah Warren, Daniel Waters, Agnes Wathall, Charles Weatherford, Bruce Weigl, Judith Werner, Gail White, Marc Widershien, Elie Wiesel, Jill Williams, Joyce Wilson, Carmen Willcox, Jeffrey Woodward, Douglas Worth, Leo Yankevich, Marly Youmans, and Edward Zuk. That's quite an impressive list, and it's constantly growing (and thereby attesting to the health and vigor of contemporary poetry and the arts).

Our "Blasts from the Past" and "Masters" pages include work by poets such as Conrad Aiken, Louise Bogan, A. E. Housman, Ezra Pound, and many others.