Poetry | clivejames.com

As with the Essays section, this Poetry section began from the idea of simply making available any poem I had recently written which I thought might eventually appear in book form. Once again as with the Essays, the less insular idea soon occurred to me that I should be providing also a mini-anthology from other practitioners that I admired, so that they, if not I, might provide the visitor with an adamantine standard. Hence the Guest Poets, all of them still alive at the time I write this, although I already have my eye on some of the dead, who might eventually appear under some such general heading as Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors. Except, of course, that they have never been forgotten, and what they built to last is nothing like a shadow.

Also in this section, under the heading Lyrics, is a group of links to various topics associated with the texts I have written for the music of Pete Atkin over the course of more than forty years. There are various chapters of a Poetry Notebook that I continue to publish from time to time in Poetry (Chicago) and other outlets, and there is a guide (painstakingly assembled by Cecile Menon) to the articles on poetry collected in my various early books of criticism as represented on the site, so that the reader can link straight through to those articles without going around the houses. At that point things get a bit confusing, but I really do intend to sort it all out one day, and arrange things neatly, with clear demarcations. For the moment, however, the reader must take my assurance, until the fact becomes evident, that the individual poem, whether by me or someone else, is the driving force of this section and indeed of the entire site. The site is a saturated solution. The poem is the speck that makes the whole thing crystallise.