From The Clay Pot:

The car ran out of gas; I had to walk.
The grass turned brown and then gave way to clay.
The dirt was red, and on a rainy day
Had sucked up shoe-marks now turned into rock.
I followed this relief, until a block
Of solid concrete showed me where there lay
The slab from some old store that seemed to say,
With eloquence that taught me stones could talk:
You seek a pathway forward, yet you drive
Encumbered by your need to fill your tank,
Insuring your survival, nine to five,
By heart-attacking suit for shares and rank.
Where did these shoe-marks lead? Can you forego
The weary world a few miles, still, and know?

PGE 11-30-2014

It was not hopeless, then; great Caesar reigned,
Deputed Herod, turncoat from the Jews,
Who built another Temple, made the news
In common Greek, while Latin forces trained.
This child of Esau, called the Great, unchained
Sanhedrin lawyers, winners born to lose,
The enemies of Maccabees, who choose
Tyros, not tears, with Tyrian gold retained.
It is not hopeless, now, though bookshelves fall,
And all about me scatter envelopes
Which, torn, revealing bills, put paid to hopes
I banked in ignorance; but I have read
That wheat, that grows in winter, seeming dead,
Gives birth, when crushed, and flowers into bread.

PGE  12-24-2016

Poetry Collections

The Clay Pot is the fourth small collection of poems I’ve put together. The first, Depth Perception, used a sonnet cycle I had just written as the organizing principle for a number of pieces ranging from juvenilia on up. One major reason for assembling that collection was to fix in place most of those works, so I could stop tinkering and reshuffling and move on to fresh compositions.

The next two, Unanswered Rhymes and Going Home Words, were assembled and published nearly together, but the bulk of Unanswered Rhymes is the fragment of narrative verse I call “the poetic Roland.” Both of these collections include poems from my graduate school years and my travels in Europe and Japan; as the title suggests, Going Home Words especially comprised these poems with a number of pieces that reflect on my re-adjustment after three years in Japan, my completion of the doctorate, and my first couple of years in the professorate. Most importantly, Going Home Words brackets my marriage and conversion to the Catholic faith, the significant moves and career changes that entailed, and the spiritual journey that drove me home in all these senses.

Each of these collections, then, in different ways, represented an end of one process of living and learning, and of development as a poet, while marking a new sense of what my “mature” poetic style should be. It is my hope that The Clay Pot is the best collection yet.

I have enjoyed using lulu.com services to publish these works. I also represent my work on Amazon, at goodreads, on my FB Author Page.

Inkandescence Products

One of the strongest reasons that “incandescence” merged with “inkan” to become my trademark is the power of luminous moments like sunrise, like encountering an ancient river in the middle of a busy city, like walking in the hills among fall foliage. My first art designs, and still my signature pieces, are scenes from my 2002 visit to Prague that capture all three. Over the past several years, I’ve carefully rolled out a selection of designs for postcards and mugs at zazzle.com. I have many more in the queue behind them.

I’ve organized my designs into three main categories:

• Inkandescence Abroad
  features postcards from my travels, with related paper products.
• Insert Coffee Here is a
  line of mugs with various photographic, poetic, and travel themes.
• finally, Mystic Haiku Mugs are a fun use of the “morphing mug” concept,
  revealing an image of coffee and a haiku when the cup is full of hot liquid.

A few more bona fides

You can go to inkanblot.com/contact or just click on the card below to download a vcard:

No, I never have. If I had to “teach poetry,” which, thank God, I don’t, I would concentrate on prosody, rhetoric, philology, and learning poems by heart. I may be quite wrong, but I don’t see what can be learned except purely technical things—what a sonnet is, something about prosody. If you did have a poetic academy, the subjects should be quite different—natural history, history, theology, all kinds of other things. When I’ve been at colleges, I’ve always insisted on giving ordinary academic courses—on the eighteenth century, or Romanticism. True, it’s wonderful what the colleges have done as patrons of the artists. But the artists should agree not to have anything to do with contemporary literature. If they take academic positions, they should do academic work, and the further they get away from the kind of thing that directly affects what they’re writing, the better. They should teach the eighteenth century or something that won’t interfere with their work and yet earn them a living. To teach creative writing—I think that’s dangerous. The only possibility I can conceive of is an apprentice system like those they had in the Renaissance—where a poet who was very busy got students to finish his poems for him. Then you’d really be teaching, and you’d be responsible, of course, since the results would go out under the poet’s name.

(source: Paris Review – The Art of Poetry No. 17, W. H. Auden)

Until very recently, that was the only time I could say I’d actually made money as a poet.  But thanks to a few sales via lulu.com, The Clay Pot has already paid back my very small production costs.  It’s not going to make me rich, but I’m grateful.

The Kickstarter is still running.  Please help it get funded in the next 18 hours or so!

Here’s the latest update.

For a long time, now, my “scriptorium” standing desk has been under the watchful eyes of an image of Christ the Teacher.  Not because I imagine that my work is properly “sacred,” but because I think everything true, good, and beautiful comes from and return to that one God who makes Himself and all things intelligible to us in Christ Jesus.  I hope that something in my work goes beyond my little life’s experiences, is caught up in the transformation of all things.

So when I ask for help with my art, I’m very sincere when I say that your encouragement to me and my gratitude to you are the main things I can see exchanged–and I am very happy when we can share in each other’s work so concretely, can make something really and visibly good happen in this world.

I think we can still see this thing work out, because as Kickstarter starts rotating this up in the “almost finished” results, some new folks will see it for the first time. Please keep sharing, and back if you can, because we are now well and truly in the last day of this project.

Here’s me, reading from The Clay Pot, one more time, for now:

If you enjoy this, will you help me out by publicizing or backing my Kickstarter campaign to promote The Clay Pot?

For he does think, although I’m oft in doubt
If I can tell exactly what about.
Ah yes! his little foot and ancle trim,
’Tis there the seat of reason lies in him;
A wise philosopher would shake his head, ­
He then, of course, must shake his foot instead.
At me in vengeance shall that foot be shaken —
Another proof of thought, I’m not mistaken —
Because to his cat’s eyes I hold a glass
And let him see himself a proper ass?

(source: Edgar Allan Poe “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!”)

Yes, who among us could not use a little dose of historical perspective, just now?

If you do, won’t you please consider helping me promote my newest collection, The Clay Pot?

“All Soul’s Vigil”

Leave silences to Autumn. Let them fall.
I have enough to do to stand the chill,
And need the cheer. Rebuke me how you will,
Allowing me this only: one last call.
Sulky embers warm, and I recall
Outpourings from a heart that drank its fill
Of amber, ruby, white, by cask or still.
All words read ripe; each echoed in the hall.
I do not know how many days remain.
A year, a day, a week? The bowl will break,
And out will pour the mead, a golden lake
That tarnishes ’til swift hands blot the stain.
Then pour me out. Be all my words undone,
Save only this, which marks what I have won.

PGE 11-01-2013

This poem appears in my third collection, Going Home Words.

Thanks to my first supporters in my Kickstarter campaign to promote The Clay Pot!  Here’s a poem that was published in The Penwood Review, a Southern California poetry journal that was a frequent outlet for my mentor, Dr. Pilkey.  This was written as I contemplated my return from Japan in 2006, and first appeared in print in 2007:

“To Have Boldly Gone”

Where I have been through three unthinking years
Is not so far from where you knew me, when
You’d looked through all I’d never seen and been
Surprised by what might grow from showered tears;
And yet, we’ve read our way up through the spheres;
Heard creaking, clanking music; filled a den
With smoke and dreams and laughter; but again
Stilled all these things except what rhyme reveres—
So you who know me well, consider yet
That all I have not thought of still has been
Caught up in all I’ve seen, and each I’ve met
Has been to tell me now what I knew then:
That where we stumble boldly, still there’s grace
Trips over all we’ve done and saves our place.

PGE 5-27-2006

This poem was later published in my first collection, Depth Perception.

Please help by promoting this far and wide, and of course I’d be utterly thrilled to send you a copy of my work!

“Meditation on a Rainy Day”

“O God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust, the rainbow would not be”
Langston Hughes

O God Who sends upon us rain,
Help us to sing Thy praise;
Help us Thy glories to proclaim,
Sing wonders all our days.

We see the drop fall in the grass,
To nourish up the seed;
Lord, how out of this earthy mass
Grow plants to meet our need?

The waters pass; the clouds are dry;
The sun sends forth his rays.
We see Thy rainbow in the sky
Exalt Thy wondrous ways.

O God of grandeur: rain or sun,
May we in thee find peace;
That, with our day’s hard labor done,
Our joy shall never cease.

3-4-1993 PGE

And here’s the oldest poem I have written down in my archives (not absolutely the first, but I’m not going to dig out my old file with scraps of blotter pads and napkins on it to check, right now).

For, y’know, a sense of depth.

“To Live”

to laugh at the threat of evil;
to defy death and pain
in a quest for the right,
the greatest gain.

to sneer at wrong and might;
to breath free and deep;
to laugh and love,
to lose and weep.

to be free to the last,
to die with grace;
in the pursuit of truth
to set high the pace.

1991 PGE

Send me a link if you have something to suggest for this playlist. I think we all need it.

Because sometimes we all need a little reminder.

Sip Before Speaking Morphing Mug by Inkandescence
Create one-of-a-kind personalized cups from zazzle.com.

I promise, it won’t be all ads. But I have enjoyed getting these things designed and set up, and I’m trying a lot of things out.

So please, do chuckle, do laugh, do let me know if you spot bugs or design problems, and remember me when you want to read a poem–or send a pretty or witty gift.

First, and more important, that the sonnet is usually composed of actual sentences in standard English; the sonnet form does not lend itself to the sorts of fragmentary or merely associative utterance often found in free verse effusions or more experimental verse forms.  

Second, and more precisely the meaning of the term, in “closed syntax” the line boundaries are also phrase boundaries.  This does not mean that line boundaries are necessarily sentence boundaries, though it is conventional for each quatrain to begin and end on a sentence boundary.  But whether it is a prepositional phrase such as “into the applecart” or even a noun phrase such as “the sun that bakes the asphalt road ahead,” the line break should come before or after the phrase, not in the middle of it.

Breaking a grammatical unit with a line break is a technique called “enjambment”; the most strictly traditional sonnets will use it sparingly, if at all.  Enjambment is typically used to indicate an overflow of emotion or thought (as though it could not be contained within the line), or as one way to set up a “false syntactic closure” effect (where the first words of one line incorporate the last words of the previous line into a larger grammatical unit that changes the apparent sense of the first line).  Sonnet writers vary significantly in their observance of this convention, but it always exercises some degree of force; and the stricter the sonnet, the greater the power of any particular enjambment will be.

Poems, mostly sonnets, written since the completion of my last collection. In these works, concrete imagery and metaphysical reflection serve as lenses to survey a number of durable realities. The progression from “Thinging” to “Thinking,” as well as the philosophical nature of many of these poems, derives from the major intellectual adjustments that have resulted from my embrace of the Catholic faith and the metaphysical realism, best worked out by St. Thomas Aquinas, that follows naturally from that understanding. A brief annotated selection of 1995 poems provides some depth of field for the intellectual and poetic landscape here sketched.

(source: The Clay Pot by Peter G. Epps (Paperback) – Lulu)

If you know someone who would be willing to review it, I’d be happy to arrange to send a copy. And do please consider adding it to your collection!

I’d prefer you ordered from my printer directly (or help me get this shelf space in your local bookstore), but all my work is available through amazon.com/author/pgepps as well.

A verse has iambic rhythm, one of the four common poetic rhythms used in describing English verse, when the syllables can be divided into pairs.  Each pair (called a “foot”) has one syllable that receives more emphasis than the other, whether by loudness, quantity (how long it takes to say it), or weight (how complex the sound is).  This is the “stressed” syllable.  What makes the foot distinctively iambic is that the second syllable, not the first, is stressed.  A two-syllable foot with the first foot stressed is trochaic, not iambic.  Because both trochees and iambs have two syllables with one stress, a verse with iambic rhythm may well have trochees in it, as well; these occasional substitutions are used by writers to vary the rhythm from line to line.

Pentameter is quite easy to understand from the name:  each line has five stressed syllables.  Iambic pentameter, then, has five iambic feet per line.  Tetrameter and trimeter are also common descriptions of lines in English verse, and even dimeter is not unheard-of.  More complex rhythms often have lines of varying length (for example, “fourteener” rhythm has a tetrameter line followed by a trimeter line in each verse and two such verses in each stanza).  In the sonnet, however, which gains most of its complexity from rhyme scheme and theme, the only typical variation would be the Alexandrine, now rarely used.  An Alexandrine is the addition of two extra syllables (also called a “hypermetric foot”) to one line in a verse, strictly to add variety or emphasis.  Alexandrines are common in long poems written in heroic verse, but in sonnets they are almost never used except in the last line of the poem.

A sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter in closed syntax, where the rhymes conform to a specified scheme.

Poets will, with some historical warrant, refer to almost any sonnet-like poem as a sonnet; in some periods the word has been used for most kinds of short poems (as in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, though unlike his Holy Sonnets, which all meet the typical definition).  One could plausibly choose to define “sonnet” very broadly, treating a poem as a sonnet to the extent it approximates some or all of these basic features.  Thus a sixteen-line poem in iambic tetrameter with a typical Shakespearean sonnet’s rhyme scheme, a free verse poem fourteen lines long with heavy enjambment, or any number of modifications might be thought of as sonnets.

Personally, though, I prefer to keep up a distinction between poems which allude to the sonnet form and poems properly called sonnets.  Such a distinction will have fuzzy borders, of course; but it does seem worthwhile to look carefully at whether a poem meets all three parts of the basic definition, even if it also modifies one of more of them.  Readers and critics will want to know, in any case, whether a given poem has stopped short of consistent sonnet form, or whether the modification to the form serves some specific purpose.  It also matters whether a “sonnet-like” poem should be thought of as a sonnet with specific innovations, a new variant of the sonnet, or some other form of poem arranged to allude to a sonnet.

Briefly, then, and without spoiling the more detailed discussion in the book I’m working on, let’s define the three basic elements of the definition:  fourteen lines, rhymed iambic pentameter, and closed syntax.  Fourteen lines is easy enough; the rest of the terms describe relations of sound and sense to those lines.  It is often handy to know that lines in English poems are frequently grouped by rhymes, so that a “quatrain” is a group of four lines identified by a rhyme pattern; an “octave” eight lines; a “sestet” six lines; and a “couplet” four lines.

Rhyme in its most common and consistent sense means that exactly the same sounds are repeated from the last stressed syllable to the end of the word or phrase; two lines rhyme if the sounds at their ends rhyme, and only those end rhymes are counted for purposes of the sonnet’s rhyme scheme (as with most other English formal verse).  As a quick primer, the following pairs do rhyme:

do you care? —- over there!
under the water —- dad with daughter
what I wish is —- Do the dishes!
instigator —- refrigerator

and the following do not rhyme:

Walter Pater —- Darth Vader
what a pair! —- put away our
turn the light off —- whooping cough
What he sees is —- try to free us

There are additional kinds of rhyme, of course; I’ll be looking at some of them in my book.

In future posts, we’ll continue by looking at the rhythmic and grammatical rules for constructing a sonnet.

Their great literary rival, Anne Seward, was known to Johnson; Seward engaged in an acrimonious literary dispute with Johnson and famously defended the literary superiority of the “legitimate sonnet,” providing us with a key to the importance of the sonnet to these women and later writers.  Smith and Robinson both, in publishing their sonnets, respond in two different ways to Seward’s insistence on the “legitimate” (Petrarchan) sonnet.  On the one hand, they did not consider themselves bound by Seward’s strictures; Smith translates Petrarch from the Italian but also writes in multiple variants of the sonnet.  On the other hand, their use of the form accomplishes two goals at once, granting them the sort of “legitimate” poetic reputation Seward also sought while bypassing the fading Augustan consensus that heroic verse was the proving-ground of great poets.

Seward, Smith, and Robinson lived as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were disestablishing natural social bonds and replacing them with a revolutionary rationalism whose “science” would declare women physical and psychological inferiors well into the 20th Century.  This cultural consensus would perhaps reach the height of its strength in the 19th Century, as seen in the vogue of pseudoscientific understandings of human development such as phrenology, popular applications of Darwinism to individual and socio-cultural development, and the reduction of women to perpetual minors in the Napoleonic Code; but in the late 18th Century these determined (and sometimes desperate) women were already finding ways to defend their dignity and make their voices heard.  Rather than strive against the memory of Pope and Dryden and the criticism of Johnson, writers like Smith and Robinson chose to work in the tradition of undoubtedly great English writers that many Augustans failed to appreciate.  Shakespeare’s reputation, and Milton’s, had languished for years, but they had never really disappeared; and the formative years of the “Big Five” Romantics would also see the rehabilitation of Milton as a hero for an age of revolutionary radicalism.  As part of that formative period, poets like Smith and Robinson wrote in the form of Sidney’s still-popular work, a form appealing both for the Italianate flavor of Petrarch’s originals and for the English variants innovated by Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton.  By leapfrogging their contemporaries in favor of a “legitimate” form practiced by major writers of the past, Smith and Robinson secured their place in literary history—and became key figures in the revival of the sonnet.

Since the late 18th Century, the sonnet has never completely gone out of fashion.  Even in the United States after Walt Whitman’s promotion of free verse, writers as different as Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, and Gwendolyn Brooks have all made significant use of the sonnet form.  Rupert Brooke’s promise that, if he dies in battle, “some corner of a foreign field” will be “for ever England” comes from a sonnet; even horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft put together an odd sonnet cycle titled Fungi from Yuggoth.  In more than a few of these cases, the poets use the sonnet in ways Smith and Robinson would recognize.  Like most traditional forms, the sonnet embodies a range of cultural and personal habits of expression, a means of sharing certain insights that both gives them shape and selects them; in choosing the form, the writer of the sonnet takes on those habits and uses those means, and gains the opportunity to innovate by modifying the expectations evoked by the form.

Sonnet. n.s. [sonnet, French; sonetto, Italian.]

1. A short poem consisting of fourteen lines, of which the rhymes are adjusted by a particular rule. It is not very suitable to the English language, and has not been used by any man of eminence since Milton.

–Samuel Johnson

“Not very suitable to the English language.”  Thus did the great lexicographer summarily dismiss the sonnet under cover of defining it.  Definition two is almost as crushing:  “A small poem.”  When Johnson wrote the definition in 1755, however, it would have seemed defensible.  After all, John Milton’s career had ended a century earlier, and few poets had used the form in the interim—and, as we shall see, it was no “man of eminence” who would revive the sonnet, either.

The sonnet had been a going concern for nearly two centuries in Milton’s time.  Beginning in the middle 16th Century, sonnets in English were written whole collections at a time.  Like the plots of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnet cycles were cultural imports from Italy.  Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, translated and adapted Petrarch’s Italian sonnets for English use, and the form caught on.  Great lights of literature such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne all contributed collections of sonnets which are still read today.  Some sonnet cycles, like Spenser’s, were bids for fame; others, like Shakespeare’s, probably were not intended for publication as a single cycle at all.  But the English Renaissance was an era of great projects, and the aspiring virtuoso could display considerable skill and patience in wrangling out a successful sonnet cycle.

Why, then, a century of silence after Milton’s few and scattered sonnets?  So many reasons have been suggested that it may be best to simply say, “We don’t really know.”  I find it hard to take seriously the notion some suggest, that Milton’s use of separated sonnets to express passionate responses to matters of war and politics, and to reconcile himself to personal suffering, was so shocking to the sensibilities of the English-speaking world as to require a century’s abstinence.  More plausibly, the dominant poetic voices of the Restoration may have seen fit to write as differently from the proud regicide as possible.  They certainly did so in their long verse narratives, which often echoed Milton even as they attempted to one-up his style.  Milton had insisted that rhyme was a decadent innovation in English long verse, and so had written Paradise Lost and his other great epics in blank verse.  Restoration poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope built their reputations in heroic verse, which requires that long poems be built up out of rhyming couplets—and that every line ending also be a phrase ending.  Few poets can write for long without turning heroic verse into an unbearable jangling, a point that Pope’s Essay on Criticism drives home with memorable wit.

My own conjecture, added to the heap of such historical second-guessing, is that this warfare over poetic form itself probably led to the neglect of the sonnet.  With Paradise Lost dominating the imagination of English poets, commanding their political opposition and their literary allegiance at once, there was little for the reputation-hungry poet to do but attempt the grand philosophical epic.  Milton’s own arguments against rhyme sharpen the question; Johnson’s dismissal of Milton’s sonnets is, ironically, based on his agreement with Milton that English is no fit language for tightly rhymed forms.  The epics and mock epics written in defiance of Milton’s writ over the next century and a half seemed instead to verify it, so thick were book-length concatenations of iambic pentameter couplets on the ground.