- Perennial Ryegrass – These Poems are most recent.
- Crabgrass – These poems are political.
- Fescue – These poems are miscellany.
- Kentucky Bluegrass – These poems, like me, have roots in Oswego, NY
What’s in a name?
To organize a poetry website into virtual bags of various grasses is to paddle in the current of American poetry broadened and deepened by Walt Whitman. Failure to acknowledge his role is to miss the boat. You needn’t take my word alone, the prominent and celebrated Donald Hall thought so too.
The ever-refreshing swiftness of that current is proved when we consider how far downstream we find Robert Frost, born a scant twenty years after Leaves of Grass was published. So, too, is shown how diverse and inclusive is American poetry. (Equity, however, is irrelevant where there is an aesthetic ideal.)
Poetry takes to the witness stand whenever love is on trial
“And the Reason we honor love is because it looks up, not down, it aspires and doesn’t despair.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Method of Nature, 1841.
“Love makes sense.”
– Dave Read, Annals of American Poetry Authority, 2024.