Monday, January 5, 2015

'Garden Lover': the Place to Grow Poems

            Happy New Year, all! Best wishes on the coming year, and if you have any festivity left, today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

            Some of my poems are appearing in the online literary journal Verse-Virtual this month. This is a group of poems on the theme of -- surprise! -- gardening. Or 'outdoor living.' Or some of the natural consequences of spending time in the garden, such as getting close to bees or imagining that you're some little god or empire builder deciding what grows where. I've decided that growing things and poetry go together. 
   
            The sequence is called "Garden Lover." Here's the link:
http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2015-january.html

            The poem "Parsing of Names" comes from discovering that scientists have determined on a great many more "parts of the flower" than I imagined existed. After studying some technical verbiage about flower sex on line I was occasionally disconcerted, or amused, to find the cheerful injunction "click to print for children" on the bottom of the page. "Human Bee-ing" pursues a connection between them and us. After all, we both like flowers.
         "The Scripture of Nature" follows from a notion I have long entertained that the natural world can in some be "read" as the book that's been written by Earth, or universal nature, or creation, or God. But the poem is way less serious. The same idea is pursued, sort of, in a poem about the turn of the year ("The Name of the Flower"). Then I'm back to bees again in the last poem, "Consider the Bee."

 
            A few poems were also published last month in the same journal -- the poem about the hummingbird, the one about Sonya's birthday, and a poem about walking on Wollaston Beach. I've had occasion to read a couple of these aloud.
            They're at:
http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2014-december.html

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