Basalt
creeks the volcanic province builds
difference into silence buzzing the
ravines with the Great Wall of thought
so that even the currents of air sculpt
the shape the water makes holds all its
early information in stones and sound
of water over creekstone lava done the
way flow talks that little hidden
fender of itself to measure whateverâs
in the way not a mistake just a fissure
an isolated vent where the water will
find around the rocks intentional waves
an invert floor of floating worlds
another culvert for an old old story
the one that feels the river one way
April 19, 2021
Harry J. “Webby” Webb Sr. made his final journeyFriday, March 26, 2021, to be with his family and to paint the skies. He passed away peacefully surrounded by his loved ones at the Delaware Veterans Home in Milford. Harry was the patriarch of the family. Harry was 83 and born June 27, 1937, to the late Louis and Alice Webb in Wilmington.
Harry was a very dedicated soldier in the U.S. Army, serving 28 years. He served two tours in Vietnam. He was a true military man. He received many commendations, awards and metals while serving. After retiring he picked up the skill of painting, and painted many homes from Florida to Bethany Beach, whistling the entire time he worked with Randy Long for 15 plus years.
It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s
Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default poetic frame for contemporary experience. While Christie’s book presents these lyrics as discrete events in an ongoing pattern of reflections on motherhood, love, crisis, and poetry itself, in Winger’s collection, these lyrics accumulate at times into longer sequences that pose the challenge of conceiving human existence on a cosmic scale, in which “all the radio signals / we’ve ever heard
It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s
Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default poetic frame for contemporary experience. While Christie’s book presents these lyrics as discrete events in an ongoing pattern of reflections on motherhood, love, crisis, and poetry itself, in Winger’s collection, these lyrics accumulate at times into longer sequences that pose the challenge of conceiving human existence on a cosmic scale, in which “all the radio signals / we’ve ever heard
INTRODUCTION
As I’ve learned from my own experiences in the classroom both as a student and as an instructor, poetry is so often taught badly to us in grade school (if at all). I am, to this day, learning how to undo the myth of poetry being the work of certainty a perfect command of a subject, experience, event proclaimed through verse. This is obviously a byproduct of the ways in which the Western canon is taught: the work of “great masters” whose genius we are trained to admire and respect. But my immersion in queer and disability writing has taught me the value of