The HyperTexts

Issues from November 1, 2001 to December 2008

December 2008: This month our first new Spotlight poet is Paul Stevens, the founder and editor of two literary journals: the Shit Creek Review and The Chimaera. A transplanted Englishman, he now lives on the New South Wales coast with his wife and numerous children, dogs, trees and raucous birds.

We're also pleased to re-shine the THT Spotlight on the work of Joe M. Ruggier, a Maltese poet now living in Canada who has sold more than 20,000 books . . . most of them poetry books he sold door-to-door!

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight, with four new THT exclusives. And it's now official: Tom is our Poet in Residuum!

We have added a page of poems by, about and admired by Abraham Lincoln.

Last but certainly not least, we have a very interesting article, "A Direct Experience with Universal Love" by Sharron Rose, a poet/artist who had a mystical experience in Sitges, Spain on Christmas Eve 1984, and now lives in California with a cat who insists on sitting in her lap while she types on her computer.

November 2008: This month's first new Spotlight poet is Scott Standridge. Scott is yet another fine poet who hails from Arkansas. Jim Barnes, Greg Brownderville, Jack Butler and Sam Gwynn (who continues to be spotlighted this month) are other THT poets with Arkansas roots. Must be something in the water there, or perhaps it's the mayhaw jelly that gets the poetic juices flowing . . .

Our second new Spotlight poet is Ann Drysdale, who "was born near Manchester, raised in London, married in Birmingham, ran a smallholding and brought up three children on the North York Moors and now lives in South Wales." Among her literary accomplishments, she had the longest-running by-line column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Her fifth collection, Quaintness and Other Offenses, is scheduled for Spring 2009.

Mary Rae is once again in the Spotlight, as her book St. John of the Cross: Selected Poems, originally published in 1991, has recently been released in a long-awaited revised edition, which you can peruse and order by clicking here. Saint John of the Cross famously went through a "dark night of the soul" to emerge as one of the shining lights of mystical poetry.

October 2008: This month the THT Spotlight shines on John Whitworth.

Whitworth and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn are good friends and admirers of each other's poetry, and so we're pleased to re-spotlight Sam's work alongside John's.

September 2008: This month we're pleased to be able to shine the THT Spotlight on Arthur Mortensen, a much-published poet, and the webmaster of Expansive Poetry & Music Online.

Last month we published the short story "Missionaries" by Sally Cook. This month we're back with poetry by Sally Cook, including her take on Newton, Adam, Eve and man's sinful, nay gluttonous!, lust for apples and knowledge. We just wonder which sort of apples, and whose, Adam was really after . . .

August 2008: Joseph Salemi is back, with a second installment of A Gallery of Ethopaths, accompanied by more illustrations by Bob Fisk.

Speaking of Bob Fisk, we're pleased to be able to publish "Missionaries" by his wife, Sally Cook. Is "Missionaries" a work of fiction, non-fiction, or something in between? We'll never tell, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

The Archpoet is the latest poet in our Blasts from the Past series. Not much is known about him, except that he has the coolest name ever, wrote in medieval Latin circa 1165, and seems to have given the modern world one of our first glimpses of the vagabond poet/rogue scholar.

It's our honor and privilege to publish Richard Moore's epic poem "The Mouse Whole" in whole, not in part.

May 2008: This month we are pleased to be able to publish THT's Second Interview with Richard Moore.

New to the Spotlight this month is Ian Thornley's "Song of a Son of Light."

We are also delighted to be able to feature a second long poetic work, "Blue Beard," by V. Ulea.

T. Merrill remains in the Spotlight, with two more THT exclusives.

April 2008: New to the Spotlight this month is Charles Martin, one of our foremost translators of Latin poetry and a fine poet in his own right.

Our second new Spotlight poet is Seamus Cassidy.

This month we welcome Charles Adés Fishman back to the Spotlight, with two poems about his father that nicely complement his poems about his sister and grandson.

We have added a new article "Two Tales of the Night Sky" to our Mysterious Ways page. The article contains a short prose piece by Glory Sasikala Franklin and a poem by Harold McCurdy. Mysterious stuff indeed!

Our congratulations to THT poet Rhina Espaillat, who will be the first writer to receive the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Salem State College. Bravo, Rhina!

We have created a new page, Heresy Hearsay.

March 2008: We once again shine the THT Spotlight on the work of Dr. Joseph S. Salemi. We have published two new sections from his A Gallery of Ethopaths, with illustrations by Bob Fisk.

We've added two new poems by Jack Butler, who returns to the THT Spotlight.

T. Merrill remains in the THT Spotlight.

In conjunction with THT poet/artist/photographer Judy "Joy" Jones we are publishing a new page called The Holocaust of the Homeless.

We are pleased to announce a tribute page for Brian Coleman, a young man who befriended a number of Holocaust survivors, including THT poet Yala Korwin, before suffering an untimely death at the age of nineteen. But Brian's thoughtfulness and kindness will not be forgotten, and THT is pleased to be able to help keep his memory alive.

We are delighted to be able to publish "I remember ..." an essay by Urmila Subbarao on the dangers and joys of intolerance and tolerance, respectively.

P. Bloodsworth was born in Columbus, Ohio in November of 1974, upon which she was immediately adopted and taken to be raised on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whereafter, other than a rumored kinship to an Apache shaman known as Goyathlay, information on her background remains as elusive as her somewhat scattered writings, some of which you can read here by clicking her name.

Wallace Stevens is the latest poet in our "Blasts from the Past" series.

February 2008: Judith Werner, our first Spotlight poet this month, lives in Brooklyn Heights and works as a grant writer for Habitat for Humanity. Previously Senior Editor for Rattapallax, she teaches a poetry workshop at Caring Community and has had poems published in many literary magazines and several anthologies. She has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship, The Lyric’s Best of Issue Prize and Honorable Mentions, the Ronald J. Kemski Prize, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

T. Merrill remains in the THT Spotlight.

Because Werner and Merrill are both fans of A. E. Housman, we have elected to spotlight Housman's work again this month in our "Blasts from the Past" series. Please be sure to check out Werner's "Post-Modern Glosa," a poem which incorporates lines by Housman.

January 2008: Our first Spotlight poet this month is Mary Rae, a widely published poet who was formerly editor of Romantics Quarterly, a literary journal founded by poet Kevin N. Roberts. A graduate of Boston University with a degree in Spanish Language and Literature, Mary Rae is also a composer, artist and translator. Her book, St. John of the Cross: Selected Poems, was published in 1991, and she is currently at work on a revised edition. Samples of her music, poetry, and art can be found at www.maryraemusic.com.

Returning to the Spotlight is T. Merrill.

The latest edition to our Blasts from the Past series is Thomas Wyatt, with an introduction by Jeffery Woodward.

We've also added a page of the Selected Poems of A. E. Housman to our "Blasts from the Past" series.

We have added Laurel Johnson's book review of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust to THT's Essays & Assays page.

December 2007: This month our first Spotlight Poet is Bill Coyle, whose poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, the New Republic, and Poetry.

Our second Spotlight Poet this month is Tom Riley. Riley was born in 1958 and grew up in Western New York. He was educated at Hartwick College and at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches English literature and Classical languages in Napa, California, where he lives with his wife, Mary, a stepdaughter, three small children, his in-laws, and a timid Belgian shepherd. He exercises way too much for a man his age and enjoys the potation of whiskey, cursing his enemies, and shooting the bow. He is not well practiced in the art of smiling. He is, however, well practiced in the art of poetry.

Our third Spotlight Poet is Bruce Weigl. Weigl enlisted in the Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent four years in the service, serving in Vietnam from December 1967 to December 1968, where he received the Bronze Star. He has contributed various well-renowned poems for over 25 years. Many of his poems are inspired by the time he spent in Vietnam.

We're pleased as punch to be able to publish a new poem, "A Slice of Life" by T. Merrill, which is based on an incident that occurred recently in Bucharest.

George Eliot is our newest "Blast from the Past."

Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was the Poet Laureate of England, yet "his writing suffered the singular and ironic misfortune of winning broad public favor at the expense of understanding."

I have started a new, somewhat mystical page entitled Sandra Jane Burch: A Voice Beyond.

November 2007: This month we're pleased to shine the THT Spotlight on the poetry of George Held. Many of our readers will recognize his work from The Neovictorian/Cochlea, The New Formalist, Commonweal, and other journals of note.

Jeff Holt is a therapist whose poems have been published in William Baer’s Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, The Formalist, Measure, The Evansville Review, Pivot, Iambs & Trochees, The Texas Review, Rattappallax, Cumberland Poetry Review, Sparrow, and elsewhere.

W. Riley Munday—Riley Munday to family and friends—was a native Mississippian and a graduate of Mississippi College and the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. He was a Baptist minister, humorist, after-dinner speaker, husband, father, grandfather, and published poet. His two long-play humor records, "Smile, Southern Style" and "Seventh Sense" both went into at least four pressings. His poetry chapbook The Beginning Tree was published in 1971.

Our Holocaust Poetry pages now rank in the top ten with Google. If you haven't read the work of Miklós Radnóti, Wladyslaw Szlengel and the other Holocaust poets we've published, there's no time like today. Once again, we'd like to express our appreciation to Yala Korwin, Esther Cameron, Charles Adés Fishman, and the other fine poets who have helped us assemble one of the finest collections of Holocaust Poetry, Art and Essays on the Internet.

Please click here for a book review of Richard Moore's Buttoned Into History, reviewed by Eleanor Goodman.

September 2007: This month we have a special article, "Flying the Flag on 9-11" written by THT editor Mike Burch.

We have added a number of new poems to the page of T. Merrill.

We've added new lyrics by Leonard Cohen to our Rock Jukebox page.

A'isha Esha Rafeeq-Swan has worked extensively with HIV, substance abuse, homelessness and advocacy groups. Her causes also include the end to violence and racism, and the promotion of peace, love, well-being and unity for all. She has been published by Street Spirit and is the co-producer of The Bones of the Homeless Will Rise. We're pleased to be able to publish her tribute poem "Ode to Judy Jones." Judy (Joy) Jones is an artist, photographer, poet, and storyteller with fascinating and sometimes out-and-out miraculous tales to tell of her work among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."

August 2007: T. Merrill is a gifted poet, painter and photographer who is a THT Spotlight Poet for the second time. He's been a frequent contributor to our "Blasts from the Past" series and has aided and abetted THT in more ways than we can possibly hope to repay.

July 2007: "The Totems of Poetry" by Dr. Joseph S. Salemi is the latest addition to our Essays & Assays page. Dr Salemi is also our Spotlight poet for the month of July.

The latest poet in our "Blast from the Past" series is Thomas Campion (1567-1620). His page features an introduction by Jeffrey Woodward.

Johnmichael Simon started writing poetry seriously as retirement age arrived, after meeting his life partner, Helen Bar-Lev, an artist who is also a THT poet. Together they have collaborated on three published books.

June 2007: Christina Pacosz, our latest Spotlight Poet, has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for nearly half a century and has several books of poetry, the most recent, Greatest Hits, 1975-2001 (Pudding House, 2002). Her work has appeared recently in I-70 Review, Jane’s Stories III, Women Writing Across Boundaries and a poem has been accepted for publication on-line by Pemmican.

Louise Bogan is the latest poet in our "Blasts from the Past" series.

Gordon Ramel is a scientist who has "come to poetry as a scientist." His university degrees are in ecology. He won a first poetry prize at the age of 14, but didn't really find "time to water the seeds of creativity" until he was 43. His poem "Darkness" is based on what might be called a "waking vision," and it seems prophetic both in its origin and in its message.

May 2007: Ezra Pound is the subject of the latest installment of our "Blasts from the Past" series, and his page kicks off with an introduction by T. Merrill, a frequent THT contributor.

Our first Spotlight poet this month, Janet Kenny, left a good life as a painter and singer in New Zealand to sing professionally in England then escaped to Sydney, Australia. There she was active in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement and jointly wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry. She now lives by the sea in Queensland. She has published essays and poems in print and many online journals including Mi Poesias, The New Formalist, Avatar, The Susquehanna Quarterly, The Raintown Review, and Iambs & Trochees.

Debbie Amirault Camelin, our second Spotlight poet, lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband and three children. She is an eight generation Acadian with roots in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her poem "Intimidation," the winning poem in the 2006 Tom Howard Poetry Contest, was inspired by a real-life event on a journey through South Africa in 2001.

Leland Jamieson, our third Spotlight poet for May, lives and writes in East Hampton, Connecticut. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNC at Chapel Hill. Although he has been a scribbler of verse since he was a teen, starting in 2002 he began to devote himself to formal poetry. His goal is to tell stories and present vignettes relevant to today’s readers. "Teaching myself to write in rhyme and meter, and committing myself to that endeavor," he says, "has been the most liberating experience I have ever enjoyed in my writing life. What rhyme and meter most liberated for me was feeling, and with it fresh insight into people (including myself), and into the nature of the world we call home."

April 2007: Maureen Cannon died at her home in Wyckoff, N.J. in January 2007. She had published over one thousand poems, most of which were written "in under a minute." We are pleased to be able to publish a number of poems by Maureen Cannon, provided to us by Light Quarterly editor John Mella.

Sheema Kalbasi is an award-winning Iranian-born poet, a human rights activist, a literary translator, the Director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry in Translation, the Director of Poetry of the Iranian Women Project, and a passionate and outspoken defender of ethnic and religious minority rights. She writes of love, loss, exile, and brave women who protect their children and defuse hate through their very existence. Kalbasi lives in the U.S. now, but honors her Iranian heritage.

March 2007: This month we're pleased to feature C. L. (Cynthia) Toups as a new Spotlight Poet. Toups is a self-employed editor and technical writer with a B.A. in History from Loyola University New Orleans. Her love of history and music fuels her poetic themes along with her south Louisiana roots.

Our second new Spotlight Poet is David Leightty, whose second chapbook, Civility at the Flood Wall was published in 2002; his first, Cumbered Shapes, was published in 1998. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Blue Unicorn, The Cumberland Poetry Review; The Epigrammatist, Light, The Lyric, Phase and Cycle, Riverrun, Slant, Sparrow, Spoon River Anthology, SPSM&H, and The New Compass. In 2003 Leightty founded Scienter Press (www.scienterpress.org), a small poetry press.

Our third new Spotlight Poet is Helen Bar-Lev. Since 1976 Helen has devoted herself to art: painting, teaching and writing poetry. From 1989 until 2001 she was a member of the Safad Artists’ Colony in the Upper Galilee where she had her own gallery. Today she paints and teaches in Jerusalem. To date Bar-Lev has participated in 80 exhibitions, including 30 one-person shows. Her poems and paintings have appeared in many online journals such as The Other Voices International Project, The Coffee Press Journal, Boheme Magazine, The Poetry Bridge, River Bones Press and also in print anthologies such as Meeting of the Minds Journal, Voices Israel Anthologies, Manifold Magazine of New Poetry, Lucidity Poetry Journal and others. She is the global correspondent in Israel for the Poetry Bridge and Editor-in-Chief of the Voices Israel annual Anthology.

Our fourth new Spotlight Poet is Yelena Dubrovina, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia where she received her Master Degree in Library Science. She left Russia in 1978, and since 1979 she has resided in Philadelphia. Yelena is the author of two books of poetry, “Preludes to the Rain” and “Beyond the Line of No Return,” and of many literary essays. In addition, she co-authored a novel “In Search of Van Dyck” with Dr. Hilary Koprowski. From 1983 to 1991, she was on the editorial board of the poetry and art almanac Vstrechi/Encounters.

Our fifth new Spotlight Poet is Jeffrey Woodward, whose poems and articles have been published widely in North America, Europe and Asia in various periodicals, including Acumen (England), Blue Unicorn, Candelabrum (England), The Christian Century, Connecticut River Review, Envoi (Wales), Gryphon, Haiku Scotland, Hrafnhoh (Wales), International Poetry Review, Invisible City, Lines Review (Scotland), The Lyric, Nebo, Piedmont Literary Review, Plains Poetry Journal, Poem, Re: Arts & Letters, Second Coming, South Coast Poetry Journal, Staple (England), Studio (Australia), and many others.

We've added a new poem, "A Child of the Millennium," by Charles Adés Fishman.

We have also added "Who knows one?" by Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, "Displaced Persons Camp in Darfur" by Yala Korwin, and "What for Darfur?" by Ed Miller to the For Darfur page.

And we've added a fine new poem, "Unwithered," to the poetry page of T. Merrill.

February 2007: W. H. (William Henry) Davies is the fourth installment in our "Blasts from the Past" series, and his page kicks off with an introduction by Davies admirer T. Merrill. Davies came from a poor family, didn’t go to college, was "tossed out of school at an early age for having organized a little gang of school acquaintances for the purpose of robbing local businesses," and ended up becoming a hobo, a career that ended when he attempted to jump a train, fell, and lost a foot under the train’s wheels. This unfortunate accident (for Davies) became a fortuitous incident (for the world), as Davies went on to become a writer of considerable distinction, publishing more than twenty volumes of poetry and several prose works, most notably The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908).

Our fifth installment of "Blasts from the Past," with an introduction by T. Merrill, is Conrad Aiken, one of the sweetest singers among American poets.

Mary E. Moore, our third Spotlight poet this month, earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Rutgers University, then an M.D. at Temple University’s School of Medicine. She went on to teach at Temple and the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where she headed the Division of Rheumatology. Dr. Moore only started to write poetry seriously after her retirement. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Möbius, Raintown Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and in several other journals and anthologies.

We're pleased as tickled pink punch to announce that T. S. Kerrigan now appears on Wikipedia. A well-deserved honor for a fine gentleman and one of THT's favorite contemporary poets.

We have added new poems to our For Darfur page, including one by THT poet Zyskandar Jaimot.

January 2007: Thanks to T. Merrill, we're bringing in the New Year with a bang with the poetry of Harold Monro, in our third installment of "Blasts from the Past."

We're please to shine the THT spotlight on a number of new poems we've just added to the poetry page of Michael Cantor.

Melanie Houle was the first featured poet in The Raintown Review, and now she's a THT spotlight poet. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Lyric, Texas Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Iconoclast, Timber Creek Review, The Rockford Review, The Aurorean, Mobius, and Pearl.

Nelson Mandela is an eloquent spokesman for Africa and for all humanity, and he is someone who not only "talks the talk" but definitively "walks the walk." Mandela's page closes with a tribute in which Mohammed Ali explains why Mandela is his personal hero.

Joseph McDonough, the latest addition to our Holocaust index, is a stockbroker who lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Having worked in the World Trade Center prior to 9-11, he began writing as a way to disconnect from this monumental tragedy. He soon began writing poetry of "witness," as a way to memorialize victims of terrorism and holocausts. He has been published in several literary journals, most recently The Penwood Review, and he will be a featured poet in the January 2007 issues of Poetry Life and Times (England) and Stylus Poetry Journal (Australia).

December 2006: This month, just in time to usher in the holiday season, we're pleased to be able to spotlight the work of Mary Malone, thanks to the efforts of her good friend and advocate, T. Merrill, who has written a touching and amusing introduction for her THT poetry page.

And we're pleased to be able to shine the THT spotlight for a second time on Annie Finch, who is well known in formal circles. In addition to adding some new "Annie Finch originals," we have also added three of her translations: two of the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé, and one of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, which she co-translated with George Kline.

T. Merrill has helped us kick off our new "Blasts from the Past" section by compiling some of the best lesser-known poems of A. E. Housman.

We have added a new poem of Thanksgiving to the poetry page of Takashi “Thomas” Tanemori, and we have also added this poem, appropriately enough, to our Thanksgiving page.

November 2006: This month we welcome T. S. Kerrigan back to the THT Spotlight. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart by The Raintown Review for his poem "The Dust of Stars."

Marly Youmans is the second returning poet in the Spotlight this month, and we've added three new poems to her page that you won't want to miss.

This month's first new Spotlight poet is Eve Anthony Hanninen. Eve’s work has appeared or will appear in Mannequin Envy, Southern Hum, Nisqually Delta Review, ForPoetry, The Reality Box, Red Letter Press, and elsewhere. She edits The Centrifugal Eye, an online poetry journal.

Our second Spotlight poet is Martin Itzkowitz, who teaches in the Department of Writing Arts at Rowan University. He has served as non-fiction editor and executive editor of Asphodel, a literary journal associated with the department's graduate program. Martin has published most recently in The Lyric and Moment.

Robin Ouzman Hislop, our third Spotlight poet, was born in the United Kingdom and has also lived in Scotland, Scandinavia, The East and Spain. He now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. He started as a resident poet with Poetry Life & Times in January 2005 and took over its editorship together with Spanish poetess Amparo Arrospide from Sara Russell in May 2006.

We have also added two new poems to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

Recently, Dr. Mahnaz Badihian was kind enough to translate THT editor Michael R. Burch's poem "Brother Iran" into Farsi. If you'd like to see what a formal English poem looks like in Farsi, just click the hyperlinked title of the poem.

October 2006: This month's Spotlight poet, Alfred Nicol, is the latest of the Powow River Poets to be published by THT. Nichol edited the Powow River Anthology, published by Ocean Publishers in 2006, and was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light, published by The University of Evansville Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Formalist, Measure, Commonweal, The New England Review, and other journals.

September 2006: This month's Spotlight Poet is Jack Foley. His poetry books include Letters/Lights—Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Exiles, Adrift (nominated for a BABRA Award), and Greatest Hits 1974-2003 (published by Pudding House Press, a by-invitation-only series). His critical books include the companion volumes, O Powerful Western Star (winner of the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000) and Foley’s Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals. His radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. on Berkeley, California station KPFA and is available at the KPFA web site. His column, “Foley’s Books,” appears in the online magazine The Alsop Review.

This month we are publishing the lyrics of John Dowland, famed throughout Europe as "the English Orpheus" for his artistry and skill as the greatest lutenist of his day (1563-1626).

Mary Cresswell lives in New Zealand, where she is a self-employed technical writer and editor. She has been published in Light Quarterly, Tucumcari Literary Review, Landfall, Glottis, Tamba, and elsewhere.

We are also pleased to add three new poems to the poetry page of Terese Coe.

August 2006: David Alpaugh’s poetry, fiction, drama and criticism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Exquisite Corpse, The Formalist, Modern Drama, Poetry, Twentieth Century Literature, The Literature of Work, and California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present. His collection Counterpoint won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and his chapbooks have been published by Coracle Books and Pudding House Publications. Alpaugh operates Small Poetry Press, a chapbook design and printing service, and edits its Select Poets Series. He is well known in poetry circles for his controversial thesis of The Professionalization of Poetry, which he defended at the AWP 2004 Convention in Chicago.

James Bobrick is also featured this month, and we'll let him describe his early poethood in his own illuminative words: "Though from the Northeast I was sent to a boarding school in Southern California. I was an indifferent student but was determined to pass the sophomore English final, which would consist entirely of quotes from Palgrave's The Golden Treasury. So on a flawless spring night I stayed up till dawn, increasingly enraptured, reading poem after poem. During that night my life changed. I knew—whatever else I did—that I had to write poems and have persisted ever since." His work has appeared in many magazines here and abroad, including Candelabrum, The Cumberland Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Slant, and The Worcester Review.

Ralph O. Cunningham has published three books: Lovesongs and Others by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, and No Continuing City and Mirrors of Memory by Multicultural Books.

July 2006: It's always a pleasure when we have new, never-before-seen-in-English translations by Yala Korwin, but these translations are indeed special—the only two remaining poems of her father, Salomon N. Meisels, who died at the hands of Hitler's thugs.—MRB

Bronislawa Wajs, also known as Papusza, the Romani word for "doll", was an unusual child, even for a Gypsy child. She learned how to read and write by stealing chickens from Polish villages! To learn how she pullet-ed this off, and why she had to, just click her hyperlinked name (or nickname).

Daniel Waters was born in New Jersey, grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, and has been a jack-of-many-trades ever since. His poetry has been a long-running staple of the Vineyard Gazette, has appeared monthly in Yankee magazine for the last decade, and can be heard daily on WCAI, the Cape and Islands' NPR station. His collection "Needing Winter" was the 2005 winner of the Westmeadow Press Chapbook Contest, and his sonnet "Jellyfish" won first prize in the 2006 Newburyport Art Association Poetry Contest.

Andrey Kneller was born in Moscow, Russia. At the age of ten, his family moved to America, where Kneller was quickly able to learn English. Kneller first began to write poetry when he was thirteen years old, and has since written hundreds of poems. He has also translated poetry by Aleksander Pushkin, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Vysotsky, and other Russian poets.

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Views on Poetry and War consists of two illuminating excerpts from the book Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson.

"Are Women Underrepresented in the Small Press?" a dueling essay by Charles P. Ries and Ellaraine Lockie is an interesting back-and-forth question-and-answer debate about the problem, if it exists, of women being less published than men by the small presses.

June 2006: Jerzy Ficowski, the friend of Jews and Gypsies, died at the age of 82 on May 9, 2006 in Warsaw, Poland. According to an obituary, his only novel, Waiting for the Dog to Sleep, recently found its way into the English language. The copies arrived at Ficowski's house just two weeks before his death. Having witnessed the genocide of the Gypsies during WWII, Ficowski became one of their few translators. And if not for Ficowski, the work of Bruno Schulz, the great Polish Jewish writer, might have been lost. In honor of an extraordinary gentleman, we are pleased to be able to publish English translations of five of his poems, including a never-before-seen poem, "A Prayer to the Holy Louse."

Miklós Radnóti is considered one of the foremost 20th-century Hungarian poets.

May 2006: We are pleased to kick off a new artistic endeavor this month: In Peace's Arms. The purpose of this page is to encourage the world to seek peace's arms, not war's.

This month's featured poet, Eunice de Chazeau, may be one of the wonders of the literary world that you haven't heard of, unless you're a longtime subscriber to The Lyric or similar journals. Thanks to the efforts of T. Merrill, we're pleased to be able to introduce, or re-introduce, our readers to a contemporary poet of considerable merit.

Noam D. Plum has placed work in several publications, most frequently Light Quarterly.

Harold Grier McCurdy, was the Kenan Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mahnaz Badihian is an Iranian poet and translator with a passion and talent for English poetry.

April 2006: Jack Butler is a THT featured poet for a second time. He says of himself, "I am a noise-scarred singer, but by god I still hold the true note." That's no idle boast: his poetry will add multiple exclamation marks to anything anyone might say about him or his work. Jack Butler is simply one of the best poets writing today, and if you haven't read "For Her Surgery" or "Electricity" before, you have missed out, until now.

Rose Kelleher is one helluva poet,
and we want you to know it.
(Don't dare miss her villanelle
on the perilous charms of the Devil!)

Agnes Wathall is a poet impossible to find on the Internet ... until now! We dunnitagain, doggonit. Our sincerest thanks to Tom Merrill for bringing her work to our attention. Her "Sea Fevers" is a poem we wouldn't mind being shipwrecked with.

We're pleased to be able to publish another of Yala Korwin's fine translations of the poetry of Wladyslaw Szlengel.

Sean M. Teaford won the 2004 Veterans for Peace Poetry Contest and has had over 40 poems published (or scheduled to be published) in The Endicott Review, The Aurorean, Spare Change, and elsewhere. He will have two poems from his book of poems, Kaddish Diary, about Janusz Korczak and the children he nurtured and protected during the Holocaust, in the revised edition of Charles Adés Fishman’s anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust.

Freddy Niagara Fonseca is a talented multi-lingual poet, and is also a mover and shaker on the Iowa poetry scene, where he hosts the popular and innovative Candlelight Reading Series. His poetry has appeared in three of our favorite journals: Pivot, The Eclectic Muse, and The Neovictorian/Cochlea.

CarrieAnn Thunell is an artist, photographer, poet, columnist, interviewer and book reviewer whose poetry has appeared in some of our favorite journals, including The Lyric and The Neovictorian/Cochlea. We admire her for "wearing many hats" and helping advance the art of others (two things we've been known to do ourselves).

And last but certainly not least, we're pleased to be able to introduce the no-nonsense poetry of Juleigh Howard-Hobson.

March 2006: This month's featured poet is Harvey Stanbrough, who has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and several other prestigious awards. Harvey recently resumed editorship of The Raintown Review, one of our favorite poetry journals.

We are pleased to announce that we now have English translations of full length poems by Nadia Anjuman, the young Afghani poet who died shortly after her first and only book of poems was published.

Oliver Murray was published in THT's February issue.

Priscilla Barton was also published in the February issue.

The Powow River Anthology looks to be a landmark publication, featuring some of the best contemporary poets working in meter and rhyme. Please check it out and order forthwith!

On a personal note, I was honored to have an interview and ten of my poems published by Poetry Life & Times. I don't often toot my own horn (at least not on THT's pages), but this is one I wouldn't mind readers taking a peek at. Also, while I'm at it, I'd like to share a brief piece called "'Fine, even beautiful,' just not for us" about a poetry submission that crashed and burned despite the editor's evident appreciation of the work. Unless I miss my guess, the editor equated my use of meter and rhyme with "less than modern language." I have posted two of the poems submitted to let readers form their own opinions. Please feel free to comment!—MRB

February 2006: This month, we're very pleased to be able to exclusively feature the poetry and photography of Leonard Nimoy.

Oliver Murray is a poet with a deft touch and a sure hand. He submitted ten poems and we couldn't find fault with "nary one of 'em"—so here they all are!

Priscilla Barton is an up-and-coming poet whose words have an authentic ring.

We have added "Storms" to the poetry page of T. S. Kerrigan. "Storms" was the closing poem in the current issue of The Raintown Review, which featured poetry by several THT poets. Our congratulations to Harvey Stanbrough, who has re-taken the helm of TRR. We have updated Harvey's page with a number of poems from his just-released book, Beyond The Masks.

We have also put the finishing touches on the poetry page of Quincy R. Lehr, whose work appeared for the first time in the December 2005 issue.

And for good measure, we have "freshened" the page of Judy Jones, an artist, photographer, poet and storyteller who works among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."

January 2006: Thanks to Tom Merrill, who took the time to scan and e-mail THT a number of poems by Leslie Mellichamp, a fine poet who is also well known as the long-time editor of The Lyric.

And we're very pleased to be able to feature the poetry and photography of Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy, in addition to being nominated for four Emmy awards, has directed three of the best-selling movies of all time and has won both critical and popular acclaim for his poetry, prose, photography and vocals.

Takashi “Thomas” Tanemori—descendent of a proud Samurai family, Hiroshima survivor, peace activist, poet and artist—is a man who can share not only hard-earned knowledge and wisdom, but also an ebullient spirit.

Thanks to Amy Waldman, a reporter for the New York Times, we have three more lines of poetry by Nadia Anjuman.

The HyperTexts is honored and proud to have been able to publish a number of unique pages of poetry, art and essays about the Holocaust, some of which have never been published elsewhere. In some cases we don't even have the names of these poets, only their words. For the first time, we have "brought together" all these pages into one convenient index of Holocaust Poetry.

December 2005: Mike Snider is our featured poet this month. In addition to writing poetry, he has what we believe may be the only formal poetry blog at Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium. But forget the blog for a moment and read the man's poetry, because it's authentic with the added umpf that only comes from a man having lived what he's writing about. When you've read his poems, by all means check out his blog.

We're pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the work of Anna Evans. Anna is sure to be a featured poet in an upcoming issue of THT, quite possibly next month, so please be sure to tune your browser to THT from time to time. And please be sure to check out the formal poetry e-zine she edits, The Barefoot Muse. Good things are happening in formal circles, and Anna Evans is one of them!

Simon Harrison is another poet we expect to be featuring in an upcoming issue, but neither we nor you would want to wait to read such fine poems, so don't dilly-dally!

Quincy R. Lehr has only been writing poetry seriously since 2003, but he's making up for lost time. His poetry has been published in Iambs and Trochees and Pivot, and all indications are that he'll go far in formal circles, with ever-widening ripples ...

Nadia Anjuman is a young Afghani poet whose life and words deserve to be remembered and honored.

November 2005: We continue to showcase October's three featured poets: Anton N. (Tony) Marco, Lee Passarella and T. S. Kerrigan. And we're pleased to be able to publish reviews by Midwest Book Review's Laurel Johnson of Outlaw's Retreat by Tom Merrill and 42 Poems in Rhyme & Meter by Mary Keelan Meisel. You can find both reviews on our Essays & Assays page, alongside a review of Emery Campbell's This Gardener's Impossible Dream by Ethelene Dyer Jones. Folks, these are three fine books by three outstanding poets, and we're not going to be shy about tootin' our own horn that we "done brung them out," though in truth all credit goes to the poets and their publisher, Joe Ruggier of MBooks. You can find examples of the work of T. Merrill, Mary Keelan Meisel and Emery Campbell, all recent THT featured poets, by mouseclicking their hyperlinked names. Could we make it any easier fer ya? These books are all first editions printed in initial quantities of 100 books or fewer. Need we say more? Also, we have four late additions this month, just in time for Thanksgiving: R. Nemo Hill, Keith Holyoak, Ellaraine Lockie and Lee Slonimsky. And last but certainly not least, we have a page of art and photos by Karen J. Harlow that includes her "takes" on THT poets Luis Omar Salinas, Michael McClintock and Luis Berriozabal.

Finally, right before Thanksgiving, we're thankful that Laurel Johnson has been kind enough to grace THT with a review.

October 2005: Anton N. (Tony) Marco is a featured poet for the month of October. Tony has been a frequent contributor to THT's pages, and he's also active in the lively Las Vegas poetry scene.

We're also pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the poetry of Lee Passarella, whose poetry has appeared in Chelsea, The Formalist, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Slant, and other journals of note.

September 2005: This month we're fortunate and pleased to be able to feature the poetry of T. S. Kerrigan. Kerrigan has been published in The Formalist, Light, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Southern Review, and other journals of good repute. His work was recently included in Good Poetry, an anthology by Garrison Keillor issued by Viking-Penguin. He is also a past president of the Irish American Bar Association, and once argued a case before the Supreme Court, which he won.

We have added our third Yala Korwin page. In addition to her personal poetry and Holocaust poetry pages, we now have a page of her visual art.

And for good measure, we've added three new poems to Esther Cameron's poetry page. Also, we have added yet another superior poem, "To the Golden Gate Bridge," to Moore Moran's page. And we've added a delectable poem with the unlikely title "Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi" to Patrick Kanouse's poetry page. Bon appétit!

Also, we want to make our readers aware that Richard Moore's new book, Sailing to Oblivion, is now available from Light Quarterly Imprints. Moore is one of the best and funniest poets we have, and therefore Sailing to Oblivion is a must-have book.

August 2005: This month we're pleased to be able to feature the poetry of Douglas Worth. Worth was recommended to us by THT stalwart Richard Moore, and his work has been acclaimed by Robert Creely, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov and A. R. Ammons, among others.

We're equally pleased to be able to introduce our readers to the work of Michael McClintock, whose name and work are well known in haiku, senryu and tanka circles. In the past he has edited the American Haiku Poets Series and Seer Ox: American Senryu Magazine, and he has also served as Assistant Editor of Haiku Highlights and Modern Haiku. He currently writes the "Tanka Cafe" column for the Tanka Society of America Newsletter, and edits The New American Imagist series for Hermitage West.

We've also added a new poem, "Diving into Morning" to the poetry page of Tony Marco. We hear that Tony is making waves on the Las Vegas poetry scene, and this poem is a good indication of why he's a "splash hit."

While we're trying to find time / to further inundate the world with rhyme, here's "literary/artistic criticism" from an unexpected but helpful and hopeful source: Fred McFeely Rogers on Boethius, Saint-Exupery and Yo-Yo Ma

July 2005: We're pleased to announce that MBooks and THT have just published books by Emery Campbell and Mary Keelan Meisel, with books by T. Merrill, Zyskandar Jaimot and other THT poets to follow. To order books and CDs by THT poets, and writers of similar caliber, please click this Books Link. We hope our readers will support our continuing efforts to shine a little poetic light "here, there, everywhere."

In the spirit of Independence day, we're pleased to be able to publish a poem by Meidema Sanchez and a drawing by Victoria Lassen, both 8th graders in the class of Marcella Previdi at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School. The story of how they became inspired to fight anti-Semitism with art was originally carried by the Queen's Tribune on June 9, 2005. Our thanks to THT poet Yala Korwin for helping us obtain the rights to publish the poem and drawing.

Also in the spirit of July 4th, we have put together a page (not very originally) called Let Freedom Sing! Poetic songs of freedom are often wild and dark, as our readers will see ...

Also in keeping with our July 4th theme, we've added a page of poetry by, about and admired by Abraham Lincoln. If you'll read this page, you'll find lines penned by Lincoln that are at times reminiscent of Dickinson, Poe, Clare and Herrick. You'll also find what might be the raciest poem of the 1860s, also written by Lincoln. This bit of ribald doggerel was said to have been "more popular than the Bible" in southern Illinois! Lincoln was a true admirer and lover of poetry, and once remarked of a particular poem, "I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece ..."

THT is pleased to be able to add another fine, refined poem, "Split," to the poetry page of George Held. "Split" was rejected 40 times before finally being accepted. Which proves two things: (1) There is no accounting for taste, especially that of poetry editors. (2) George Held is one perseverant poet, and one to be Held in the highest regard. "Split" will be published in The Art of Bicycling, where it will appear alongside poems by Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove.

June 2005: This month we're pleased to be able to feature the poetry of George Held. Many of our readers will recognize his work from The Neovictorian/Cochlea, The New Formalist, Commonweal, and other journals of note. George has a wonderful personal touch on poetic portraits like "Elise" and "Honey," and one cannot help but be impressed with his ability to work Joe DiMaggio, Bill Gates, W. B. Yeats and Euterpe into a single poem ("Finding My Way").

Christopher T. George is another poet new to THT's pages whose name may ring a bell from familiar journals. His poetry has been published in Poet Lore, Melic Review and Triplopia, among others.

Judy Jones is an artist, a photographer, a poet, and a storyteller with fascinating and sometimes out-and-out miraculous tales to tell of her work among the dying, the homeless, and the "poorest of the poor."

THT had been waiting "eagerly with patience" for the right to publish "Monterey County" by Moore Moran, and now our patience has been rewarded. We have also added a brand-spankin'-new poem, "When Paris Lay at Helen's Side," to one of THT's best poetry pages, so please reacquaint yourself with it forthwith. If you've never visited Moore Moran's poetry page, you should heed these sage (ever-so-slightly-paraphrased) words of Mark Twain: "The man who does not read good poems has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

This month we also debut a new Mysterious Ways feature: "Kids on Love: What the Real Experts Have to Say."

May 2005: This month it is our pleasure to feature the poetry of Robert W. Crawford and David Gwilym Anthony. Poetry like theirs need no introduction, so please peruse forthwith! It does bear mentioning that Robert W. Crawford is yet another Powow River Poet, joining Rhina Espaillat, A. M. (Mike) Juster, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Michael Cantor, Michele Leavitt and Midge Goldberg. That's quite a high-wattage assemblage of poets, and we only wish we could dam and bottle the water they drink in "those there parts" and dole it out, Perrier-like, to some of the more arid regions still experiencing the dearth of postmodernism.

[An interesting sidenote: THT continues to feature the poetry of Pope John Paul II. In an e-mail to me, Robert Crawford pointed out another of those "harmonic convergences" that seem to happen so often with THT these days: "The odd thing (and very humbling) is that when my poem, 'Olber's Paradox,' was in First Things, that particular issue also featured a review of Pope John Paul II's poetry by Joseph Bottum."—MRB]

Ashok Niyogi has agreed to be a traveling poetic correspondent of sorts for THT, and during his current travels through India and some of the remoter Himalayan hinterlands, he has been kind enough to offer to e-mail us his thoughts and impressions in the form of poems. The first such poem, "Letter to Ulitsa Myitnaya from a Himalayan Hamlet," now appears at the top of his THT poetry page.

And now, as the cliché goes, "for something new and completely different" ... a fugue in five poetic parts about the various perils and sagas of leaves, by Charles "Charley" Weatherford. And while our introduction may not be the height of originality, the poems themselves are quite original, and good fun to boot!

We have also added a new poem, "The Unveiling of Belzec Monument," and several watercolors and other works of visual art to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

April 2005: Thanks to Esther Cameron, we are pleased to announce that Ethna Carbery is our April featured poet.

Our second featured poet is Mary Keelan Meisel, and this time our thanks goes to Joe Ruggier for arranging for us to be able to use poems of hers that he had previously published through his journal The Eclectic Muse and his Multicultural Books small press.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla was an unknown Polish actor and poet long before he became known to the world as Pope John Paul II. Please click the link to the left to see poetry by Pope John Paul II, along with a fairly comprehensive literary bio. An elegy by Joe Ruggier appears at the bottom of the page. [Editor's note: As I worked on the Pope's bio, I noticed a number of interesting similarities between his "literary bio" and that of Ronald Reagan. They both were actors; they both wrote poetry; as young men they both read what seemed to have been "prophetic manuscripts" which profoundly influenced their lives, and which they later fulfilled (the Pope's was a poem; Reagan's was a book, That Printer of Udell's); they both played vital roles in the downfall of the Evil Empire in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. How interesting that a Polish Catholic Pope and an Irish Protestant President had so much in common!—MRB]

In one of those interesting coincidences or providential convergences that seem to happen quite often, I just finished proofreading a story for a good friend (good in the truest sense of the word because she's doing good work with the poorest of the poor), the artist Judy Jones, and her story Thy Will Be Done (Iron Lung) leads off with a quotation by Pope John Paul II. Her story is on our Mysterious Ways page.

Michael Bennett is a new poet to these pages, but some of our readers will remember him from Poem Online, where his sharp eye and a sharper tongue were often wielded to aid and/or dismay young poets in search of tutelage.

We are pleased to offer two reviews of the third revised edition of This Eternal Hubbub by Joe Ruggier. Please click on this link to our Essays & Assays page to read the reviews: one by Laurel Johnson and one by THT Editor Mike Burch.

We're pleased to announce that THT is now getting between 2,000 to 3,000 hits per month on our main page, more than double the hits THT was getting only a few months ago.

March 2005: T. Merrill is our March featured poet. His poems come like a breath of fresh air on an otherwise insufferably sluggish, muggish August night. Considering the climate of contemporary poetry, we think our readers will appreciate such a freshening!

Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta, India and spent more than 25 years working in various parts of the world, including the former USSR and Russia. Now retired from commerce (other than that of words), he is a professional poet and writer who divides his time between the US and India. THT was scheduled to publish his work next month, but because he's en route to the Himalayas as this feature is added (and because he's promised to send us pictures and poems thereof to share with our readers), we have elected to send him this poetic "bon voyage!"

We're delighted to be able to add a truly lovely poem that honors the work of a THT artist, Makoto Fujimura. The poem, "Nihongan Altar," is by Marly Youmans and it appears at the top of her poetry page, so please click on her name to peruse it forthwith.

Just in time for St. Patrick's day, and thanks entirely to Esther Cameron, we have an exotic page to offer, all about a poet you've surely never heard of, but surely should have: Ethna Carbery (our heartfelt thanks to Esther for a small trove of big-hearted, heartfelt Irish poetry!).

We've also added a new poem, "Morning of Departure" to the poetry page of Tony Marco, and it's another "good 'un" that you won't want to miss.

Finally, we're thankful to Esther Cameron for sending us "The Journey to Unity" by Yosef Ben Shlomo Hakohen, which will adorn and grace our Grace Notes page.

February 2005: June Kysilko Kraeft continues as our February featured poet, along with Len Krisak, who won the Richard Wilbur prize in 2000 for his book Even as We Speak. Also, two poems have been added to the bottom of Norman Kraeft's poetry page, including a touching, gentlemanly poem by Norman Kraeft about understanding that is better read than described.

Simon Perchik has been published in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and many other journals, and "is the most widely published unknown poet in America" according to Library Journal. His poetry is full of what one reviewer calls "elemental tokens": tokens that sometimes seem simultaneously familiar and alien in the landscapes of his poems.

February seems a fine month for THT to be able to introduce its readers to the poetry of Julie Kane. Her poem "Thirteen" is reminiscent of "At Seventeen" by Janis Ian, a song that has haunted many a teenager to, through and beyond maturity. Kane's poems like "Maraschino Cherries," "Egrets," "Kissing the Bartender" and "Dead Armadillo Song" demonstrate her virtuoso range and what we take for staying power.

Michele Leavitt is another poet new to THT's pages. She joins our "powow" of Powow River Poets that now includes Rhina Espaillat, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Mike Juster and Michael Cantor.

Midge Goldberg is another new poet, for us at least, although her poems have appeared in some of our favorite journals, including Edge City Review, Pivot and The Lyric. She's yet another Powow River Poet. Just what do they lace the waters of Powow River with? Someone should bottle it, pronto!

It's a particular pleasure for THT to be able to publish two poems by Leland Jamieson. 

Tara A. Elliott is yet another poet new to THT. She and Gene Justice are co-editors of Triplopia, an eZine that has published work by several THT poets, and she has been a multiple gold medal winner of the Net Poetry & Arts Contest (NPAC), which has been judged by THT poets Tony Marco, Jennifer Reeser, Harvey Stanbrough and Joyce Wilson.

Rhina Espaillat's poem "You Who Sleep Soundly Through Our Bleakest Hour" has been added to her THT poetry page, and also to Mysterious Ways. Also new to her poetry page is "Arbol Vecino," a Spanish translation of Robert Frost's "Tree at My Window," which has been on a banner with the English original, on exhibit all summer in various city parks of Lawrence, MA ...

Esther Cameron's review of THT's Holocaust Poetry now appears on our Essays & Assays page.

January 2005: This month we have a very special featured poet, June Kysilko Kraeft. As many of our "insiders" and "frequent fliers" know by now, June Kraeft passed away July 21st of last year. June was a writer, a poet, a photographer, a cook, a prize-winning horticulturist, and the co-author with her husband Norman Kraeft of several books on American art. Her THT poetry page will not only showcase her own poetry, but will also be a place for family, friends and admirers to say their last words on her behalf. If you knew June Kraeft, or if you read and admired her poetry, please feel free to e-mail your thoughts, poetry or prose, to THT's editor at mburch@aocg.com.

Our thanks to Richard Moore for contributing his thoughtful, insightful essay "Pain and Death" to Mysterious Ways, where it is now the featured article.

December 2004: We have added a poetry page for Wladyslaw Szlengel that ties in well with similar poetry pages THT has published recently: Esther Cameron's translations of poems about Janusz Korczak, a page of writings (some recast as poems) by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, poetry by the third Pulitzer Prize nominee we've published, Charles Adés Fishman, a page of Yala Korwin's translations of the poems of Jerzy Ficowski and Jewish ghetto poets, and a special page of Yala Korwin's own Holocaust poetry.

This month we're pleased to introduce our readers to the work of Jill Williams, who numbers among her credits a Broadway musical, songwriting, an album published by RCA Victor, celebrity interviews, four nonfiction books, two poetry books, and poems in some of our favorite journals, including Light Quarterly, Edge City Review and The Lyric. She has dared to capture a yawning lion on film, and (even more daringly) has taught creative writing to college students! Oh, and she also does poetry readings across the United States and Canada.

We're also tickled pink 'n' polka dots to be able to publish the light verse of Edmund Conti, an accomplished humorist who has had over 500 poems published, although he claims not to keep count! Somehow we suspect he's not highly enough paid (is any living poet?) to make your lawsuit anything other than frivolous, so we suggest you rest your case and indulge in a little light-hearted frivolity.

It's an honor and a pleasure to introduce our readers to the poetry of Marc Widershien, an accomplished, often-published poet whose influences include Samuel French Morse, John Malcolm Brinnin, Robert Lowell, Daisy Aldan and Ezra Pound.

Len Krisak will be the featured poet in an upcoming issue of THT, but we're pleased to be able to offer our readers a "sneak preview" of his poetry page just in time to kick off the new year with a bang!

Also this month we've updated the poetry page of Zyskandar Jaimot with a new poem, "Siacon," and some of Zaj's own amazing imitations of the masters. If you haven't seen his page lately, you'd be remiss to miss the changes we've made!

November 2004: This month we're pleased to be able to review The Consciousness of Earth, a book-length epic poem by this month's Featured Poet, Esther Cameron.

We've "broken the mold" so to speak, and have published Jo-Anne Cappeluti's "Letter to Lord Auden" (an exception we think you'll be glad we made). While THT doesn't generally publish extremely long poems, this one seems worth many hyperbolic acres of hyperspace. And while we insist on a cluckish matronly "Tsk! Tsk!" to paper-and-ink journals for making poems like Jo-Anne's virtually impossible to publish these days (imagine: a long poem that, egad!, rhymes), we're happy to be able to do our part and publish it "virtually." So much so, in fact, that we're also publishing another longish poem by the same poet: "The Impotence of Being Earnest(ine)."

Another new poet this month (or at least new to THT) is Catherine Chandler. Catherine has been writing formal poetry for some time, but is somewhat new to the "publication game." So, as we say in these parts, we're "right proud" to be among the first journals to publish her work, along with two of our favorites: The Lyric and Iambs & Trochees.

J. Patrick Lewis is a poet of considerable formal skill who seems to enjoy poetry and a good laugh as much as the children he exuberantly teaches. So we hope you'll not only visit his THT poetry page, but use it to explore his web site, which will be of interest to anyone who has children, grandchildren, or who remains something of a child at heart.

Carolyn Raphael is a poet whose name will be instantly recognized by those who run in formal circles, which means she's among good friends here.

Wendy Videlock is an up-and-coming poet whose work has been published by a number of excellent journals and web sites.

We've also added a new poem "From a Widow's Diary—9/11/01" to Yala Korwin's poetry page.

We also have a bit of wonderful late-breaking news: Jared Carter, a THT Featured Poet, has been invited to read his work at the Library of Congress on December 9, 2004. For more information, please click here.

We are also pleased to be able to publish a new essay, "Thomas Stearns Eliot, an Early Re-assessment for the New Century" by Joe Ruggier. This essay is very much in the spirit of our new Grace Notes page (more on this below). How refreshing to read that a contemporary poet not only values Eliot as a poet, critic and mentor, but as a source of consolation and comfort!

Please check our Thanksgiving special, which includes two hard-to-find poems by Langston Hughes, along with various pearls of wisdom and poems from Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, Edward Arlington Robinson, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, and others. Frequenters of THT will be pleased to find poems and excerpts of poems by a number of THT poets: Jim Barnes, Beverly Burch, Jack Butler, Esther Cameron, Jared Carter, Rhina P. Espaillat. I even manage to sneak in a "poem" of my own, perhaps my first or second haiku or haiku-like poem (a fairly recent happenstance, and one not highly likely to be repeated). But there are extenuating circumstances, explained alongside the poem.

Also this month THT is introducing a new page, called Grace Notes.

August 2004: This month we're pleased to be able to feature Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel along with the third Pulitzer Prize nominee we've published, Charles Adés Fishman. And we're doubly delighted to be able to bring our readers wonderfully moving translations by Yala Korwin: translations of the poems of Jerzy Ficowski and of Jewish ghetto poets who speak to us now—largely anonymously, and thus forever united, as one Voice—from the ghettos of WWII-era Poland. And for good measure, we have a special page of Yala Korwin's own Holocaust poetry. Also, our thanks to Esther Cameron for allowing us to link to her outstanding Point & Circumference Homage to Paul Celan. And here's a link to the Norton Poets Online page for Paul Celan. Esther Cameron personally recommends the University of Wisconsin's Paul Celan page.

In closing, I'd like to publish a letter by one of the most talented, loveliest and nicest poets I know: Rhina Espaillat ...

"I've just visited the site—after a long time away from the internet altogether, because I've been up to the ears in projects, paperwork, translations and houseguests!—and I want to tell you how lovely it is, and how unfailingly interesting and instructive it remains. The addition of new work by Yala [Korwin], and the use of the photograph to accompany one of her poems, are great assets to the site and one more gift you've given the reading public."

"And here's some very sad news you may not have heard yet: I had a call two nights ago from Norman Kraeft, to tell me that [his wife] June died July 21, after a painful but mercifully brief bout with pancreatic cancer. She died—and I was not surprised to hear this—as courageously and uncomplainingly as she had lived, and left behind a final magnificent poem she had not shown anyone. He read it to me on the phone; it gave me goose pimples. Luckily he has very good friends living nearby who have been helpful and kind."

"And, finally, much happier news from here. I have two new publications out this year: a full-length book titled The Shadow I Dress In, from David Robert Books (it won their Stanzas Prize), and a little chapbook titled The Story-teller's Hour, from Scienter Press. Also, several of my translations of Robert Frost poems into Spanish are being used by the Robert Frost Foundation as part of their coming Frost Festival on October 23, in Lawrence. One of them—my Spanish version of "Tree at my Window"—is on display all summer, with the English original, on a banner that's flying in several of the city parks of Lawrence, a nearby city in which Frost and his wife both grew up, and that now has a large Hispanic population. I'm very pleased over that, as I like to see the arts used to forge living links between neighbors from different cultural groups."

July 2004: This month we are pleased to be able to feature the work of Makoto Fujimura. Fujimura is an artist and an essayist, but his art is poetic and his essays are poetic, and it's hard to imagine that anyone will quibble if we make an exception (to our rule of normally featuring poets) in his case. It helps our case (not that our case needs help) that Fujimura has created art based on T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." Noted artist and critic Robert Kushner tells us: "The idea of forging a new kind of art, about hope, healing, redemption, refuge, while maintaining visual sophistication and intellectual integrity is a growing movement, one which finds Fujimura's work at the vanguard."

We are also featuring the work of Edward Zuk, who has an interesting background to complement his highly interesting, skillfully written poetry. Zuk was born in Surrey, British Columbia, in 1971. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics and English from the University of British Columbia and went on to earn an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, where he wrote his dissertation on uses of the sonnet by American poets of the first half of the 20^th century. Being half-Japanese, he has pursued haiku poetry to explore that part of his heritage. He has served as the British Columbia coordinator for Haiku Canada.

Beverly Burch is also new to our pages, and no, she's not related to me [THT editor Michael R. Burch]. But the way she writes poetry, I'd like to think that I share a few poetic genes with her!

We also continue to feature the work of June's Featured Poet, Moore Moran. And for good measure, we also continue to feature our tribute page to Ronald Reagan, with lines of his own poetry "batting leadoff."

We have also added an important, touching picture to the poetry page of Yala Korwin. The picture inspired her poem "The Little Boy with His Hands Up." We hope you'll revisit the poem now that the picture is in place. Yala Korwin's poem and an essay "The America I Love" by Elie Wiesel, graciously mailed to us by THT poet Esther Cameron, seem to go hand in hand, and so we have also added a poetry page and links to six important essays by Elie Wiesel.

We've also added three poems to the poetry page of Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, and they're poems you won't want to miss (and will be excuseless if you do).

At the Art of Love competition organized by LondonArt.co.uk (Britain's largest contemporary art website, exhibiting nearly 10,000 artworks by over 750 artists), two of Carmen Willcox's poems were selected to appear in an exhibition (and accompanying catalog) at the Arndean gallery in London during February 2004. The poetry entries were judged by Andrew Motion, Britain's Poet Laureate. We've updated Carmen's poetry page, and we invite you to revisit it, or to visit it for the first time if you've been remiss in the past . . .

And to wrap things up, here's an Uncle Flatboot review of The HyperTexts originally published by www.triplopia.com (our thanks to Triplopia editor Gene Justice and to "Uncle Flatboot" himself, Paul Sonntag, for allowing us to use the review here).

June 2004: Our featured poet this month is Moore Moran. Readers have only to expend a hyperclick to find themselves vigorously nodding agreement with John M. Daniel, who says: “Moran is a fine writer, a really wonderful poet. He shows education without showing it off; he shows sensitivity without being sentimental." As is so often the case with the fine poets we publish, the poems of Moore Moran need no further assistance on our part, so please indulge yourselves forthwith! Also this month we've updated the poetry page of Zyskandar Jaimot with two new poems. The poems are "Substance of the image" and "Abraham's Diner, Machias, Maine." We also have a tribute page to Ronald Reagan, with lines of his own poetry batting leadoff.

April 2004: Our featured poet this month is Robert Mezey, about whose poetry we could go on at length, but whose words need no assistance on our part. We agree wholeheartedly with Galway Kinnell that what we find in Robert Mezey's work "that ultimate tenderness toward existence which is the dream of great poems." We welcome you to enter and discover, in the poet's own words, "the warm rooms of the pentameter." We are also pleased to be able to publish the poetry of V. Ulea, the pen name of Vera Zubarev. Ulea is a literary critic, writer, and film director. She has a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Pennsylvania where she currently teaches. She has published books of prose, poetry, and literary criticism and has recently finished her full feature movie, Four Funny Families, based on Chekhov’s plays. Readers familiar with Neovictorian/Cochlea and The Eclectic Muse will no doubt recognize her distinctive style and themes. We have also added four new poems to the poetry page of Marly Youmans, and we know that you will enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed publishing them.

March 2004: Our featured poet this month is Luis Omar Salinas, and we are especially honored to have been given the rights to publish his major poems in perpetuity. Although it will take some time for us to publish our entire allotment of the career-defining poems Luis Omar Salinas has personally selected for The HyperTexts, please click on the hyperlink above to see the poems we have published to date. As Zyskander Jaimot says in the introduction he penned for our readers : "Yes, attention should be paid to Luis Omar Salinas. Attention paid, to a fine poet." We couldn't agree more! Also, please read an excellent tribute poem to Luis Omar Salinas, contributed by another outstanding poet, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal. We have another tribute poem, this one dedicated to Leslie Mellichamp by Norman Kraeft. Also, please check out our latest, greatest page: Mysterious Ways. Mysterious Ways will be a permanent feature, updated frequently, akin to our Masters and Esoterica pages. We are also accepting unsolicited submissions for Mysterious Ways; please see the page intro for submissions guidelines. However, we will not allow poems to "limbo" beneath our high standards bar, so please be forewarned and submit your very best poems!

November 2003: Our featured poet this month is Norman R. Shapiro, who has supplied us with too many outstanding poems for us to possibly do them justice in a single issue. Which presents us with two dilemmas: what to use, and what to leave out. Rather than leaving out more than we can use in one sitting, we hope to be able to publish (pending his approval) a small number of poems from several of Shapiro's excellent books in semi-regular installments over the next few months. Please stay tuned, but in the meantime you can find three superb translations from Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems from "Les Fleurs du mal by clicking the hyperlink above. We're also pleased to be able to publish the poetry of Marly Youmans, of whom no less an authority than William Harmon says, "I wish more poems were like these." We've added two poems to the poetry page of Joe Ruggier: poems he says are among his "best-loved creations." And we've also added Esther Cameron's insightful review of Ruggier's "Door-to-Door to CD-ROM" literary CD, which is a collection of nineteen books on one disk.

October 2003: Our featured poet this month is Alfred Dorn. Dr. Dorn has been absolutely essential to the preservation of an endangered species: traditional English poetry. A former Vice President of the Poetry Society of America, he is the Director of the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, which has sponsored international contests since 1980. His efforts on behalf of traditional poetry, narrative and metrical poetry in particular, are greatly to be applauded. And Dom is a poet, critic, and art historian of note, having won more than seventy awards. Anthony Hecht tells us, "The poems of Alfred Dom seem to me vigorous, imaginative and original, graced with elegant formalities when the occasion warrants, manumitted and free when the spirit moves." We invite you to experience those elegant formalities by clicking on the link above.

We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Michael Cantor, whose poetry reflects a variety of interests and influences, and ranges from traditional sonnets to rib-tickling humor to oriental affairs.

The HyperTexts is pleased to be the first on-line journal to announce the availability of a new poetry CD edited by Joe Ruggier, a CD in which I was pleased to play a very small part. The CD is a compilation of nineteen books which Joe has painstakingly converted to .PDF format, and it's a great value for the price, which you can obtain from Joe by clicking the link above and going to the bottom of his poetry page, where you will find his address and phone number. You really should call Joe on the phone if only to hear what my wife says is "the loveliest, gentlest voice ... a boon for the soul." Beth, who seldom reads poetry except for the poems I write about her (which she wisely professes to like, in between stifled yawns), upon having spoken to Joe on the phone for the first time, made me immediately find her all the poems of Joe's that I had in my possession. Do you think she's ever asked to read all my poems? Hah! Back to the CD: the books include The Best of The Eclectic Muse (1989-2003), collections of poems by George Borg, Mary Meisel, Roy Harrison, Philip Higson, John Laycock, and Ruggier; "Savitri," a long prose poem by Chandrampatti; a collection of letters in verse between Ruggier and Esther Cameron; and a collection of letters between Ruggier and Roy Harrison. My contribution to the CD was technical assistance with the autostart feature of the CD, done through the computer consultancy I own and the valiant efforts of Fred Born and Rod Allen, two of my programmers. It turns out that older versions of Windows can only autostart programs, not files such as the Table of Contents file Joe needed to have launched automatically when the CD is inserted in a user's drive. But Fred, Rod and I put our heads together and found a freeware program that can launch Adobe Acrobat Reader even when the exact name and version of the AAR program are unknown, if not saving the day, at least helping to end it on a poetic note.

Last month I mentioned an "Arkansas connection" with Greg Alan Brownderville joining Jim Barnes, Jack Butler, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn on THT's pages. This month, with the addition of Michael Cantor, I think it bears mentioning that we also have a "powow" of Powow River Poets that, in addition to Mr. Cantor, includes Rhina Espaillat, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak and Mike Juster. For information on a poetry workshop "done right," please click on this link to our write-up on the Powow River Poets and the poetry contest they sponsor in conjunction with the Newburyport Arts Association. Even more importantly, please browse our Contemporary Poets index and read the work of these fine poets.

After I posted the October issue, Rhina Espaillat e-mailed me the following: " It's wonderful, also, to have our group [the Powow River Poets] mentioned in the same issue with Alfred Dorn, who is an old and valued friend to me, from NYC days, and to the Powows. He's honored us by reading here several times, with his wife, Anita, who is a fine poet herself. I can't tell you what a difference this man has made in the lives of the countless poets he's taught, encouraged, and spurred to new effort and new thought, both through example and through his unique yearly contest. Many of us wait all year for the World Order of Narrative & Formalist Poets Contest guidelines, which are like notes from several excellent college seminars! The kind of competition his contest engenders has little to do with money, and everything to do with meeting the challenges tossed out by a first-rate poetic and critical intelligence. But what he really is, at heart, is the kindest and most generous of mentors: any number of young poets today will attest to that." Of course, we know many poets who feel exactly the same way about Rhina!

I'd also like to share Rhina's comments about THT poet Yala Korwin: "I want to tell you again what a joy it is to see Yala Korwin's work posted on your site, attracting the readers she deserves. Her poetry gives the lie to the remark by Paul Celan that she uses as an epigraph to one of her poems, about the impossibility of telling one's own truth in a language that is not one's first. Yala's work is so passionate and wise about her truth—the truth of her personal experience and that of her generation—that it would somehow make itself understood if she stammered it in Chinese! Thank you for giving a forum to those of us who try to defy Celan's observation by doing our "telling"—our singing—in the language of the Other."

On a personal note, I was pleased and surprised to have Writer's Digest call me on the phone with the news that two of my poems ("See" and "At Wilfred Owen's Grave") had finished 3rd and 7th out of over 18,000 overall contest entries in the recent Writer's Digest Rhyming Poetry Contest. The poems are a mouse-click away for anyone who'd like to peruse them: just click here. — MRB

September 2003: Our featured poet this month is John Morgan. His poetry has appeared in some of our favorite journals, including Light Quarterly, The Neovictorian/Cochlea and The Eclectic Muse. But that's virtually all that we know about him, other than that we like his poetry, and that we know you will too. We have another poet new to THT this month: Greg Alan Brownderville, who tells us: "I was born and reared in a musical family of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, where I absorbed the blues, Southern gospel, country preaching saturated with the King James Bible, and the rural rhythms of life in the Mississippi River Delta. Rhythm ruled." Biblical, rural, biblical-rural, rural-biblical ... no matter the names we contrive for the rhythms of his poems, they seem simultaneously both unique and familiar—a hallmark of the best blues and gospel music. And just in time for fall, we've added "Spring Villanelle" to the poetry page of Tony Marco; it was an interesting experience to see Tony reconstruct this nearly forgotten poem from memory, as he e-mailed in tantalizing passages as they returned to him. And to top things off, we've added new poems by Frost, Poe and Dickinson to our Masters page. Interestingly, we have quite an Arkansas connection forming on the pages of THT, as we add Greg Alan Brownderville to a group of fine poets with Arkansas roots: Jim Barnes, Jack Butler, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn. And because my wife hails from Arkansas and has introduced me to the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival, mayhaw jelly, garlic cheese grits, vacation houses on stilts, and other such esoterica ... well, I feel that I have a foot in the door of this rather exclusive club!—MRB

August 2003: Our featured poet this month is Esther Cameron. It's also a pleasure for us to be able to publish the work of Max Gutmann. His poem "The Villanelle's Appeal" had stuck in my mind (a good thing for a poem to do) ever since I first read it in Piedmont Literary Review. So when Max queried us about a submission to THT, I immediately asked if he'd let us use "The Villanelle's Appeal," which he graciously did. Max Gutmann's work has appeared frequently in Light Quarterly, so prepare to be both amused and be-mused. Also, we've added three new poems to the poetry page of Richard Moore, the three poems at the top of his page. For readers new to THT, Richard Moore's poetry page is a good place to start browsing, because the man is a helluva poet: a poet who will be known to future generations if we have anything to say in the matter. Or even if we don't and good taste in poetry has anything to do with who gets read. A poem of Moore's that I particularly like is "In the Dark Season," and to me these three lines are an almost perfect description of the mysterious art of writing poetry:

One studied a new language in the darkness,
looked far down into the well,
into the hints of sunlight in its depths.

I'd encourage our readers to do what I have done myself: buy all of Richard's books, read his poems, study his essays. Get him to sign his books, because according to Richard he's pissed off his share of publishers, which means his signature may be a rare and valuable commodity in the future.—MRB

July 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jack Butler, who says of himself, "I am a noise-scarred singer, but by god I still hold the true note." That's no idle boast; his poetry will add multiple exclamation marks to anything anyone might say about him or his work. Jack Butler is simply one of the best poets writing today, and if you haven't read "For Her Surgery" or "Electricity" before, you have missed out, until now. Get back into the loop of poetry sparking like a live wire by clicking here. We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Yala Korwin, who came to English poetry in the most roundabout of ways, but we're glad she did. We also have a several new additions to our Essays & Assays page, including two reviews of Joe Ruggier's Songs of Gentlest Reflection, one by Mary Rae, the other by yours truly.—MRB

June 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jim Barnes. Samuel Maio tells us, and we concur, that "Barnes is a masterful poet, a most worthy voice for his generation." Brian Bedard says "His poems are a singing in the rain which he knows falls on us all but which, in spite of its chilling touch, also gives life to the earth we must wander over and disappear into." James Dickey says "It is a deep new pleasure to come on a poet with the imaginative boldness of Jim Barnes." So without further ado, let us point you to his poetry page. We're also pleased to bring you the poetry of Kevin Walzer. Kevin has published three books of literary criticism and has had poetry published in Connecticut Review, Sparrow, Poetry Magazine, and other journals. He is also one of the founders of WordTech Communications. Publishing through Word Press and other imprints, WordTech Communications has grown into a major force in poetry publishing with plans to publish more than 40 books in 2004. We also have a new addition to our Essays & Assays page, a review of Joe Ruggier's Songs of Gentlest Reflection, reviewed by Mary Rae.

May 2003: Our featured poet this month is Jared Carter. Dana Gioia said of Carter's first book, Work, for the Night Is Coming: “From beginning to end, this volume has the quiet passion of conviction, the voice of a poet who knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it.” Henry Taylor described Work, for the Night Is Coming as “one of the clearest and strongest first books to have appeared in recent decades.” Galway Kinnell obviously agreed about the merits of Work, for the Night Is Coming, awarding it the 1980 Walt Whitman award. Carter's second book, After the Rain, attracted similar notice. “Extraordinary,” Gioia wrote “a dark, haunting book in the tradition of Frost.” Ted Kooser found After the Rain to be “a moving and masterful book, charming in the best sense of that word.” It offered “proof,” according to Robert Phillips, “that the art of poetry is alive and well in America.” Robert McPhillips called it "the finest, most varied, and most rewarding volume of poetry published in 1993.” We could go on, but we'd rather point you directly to Jared Carter's poetry page. And we're also pleased to add three new poems to the poetry page of Terese Coe. While French delicacies may currently be out of favor in certain circles, we think our readers will enjoy Terese Coe's delicate translations and interpretations of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard. With poetry, discrimination is good thing, so please read and enjoy!

April 2003: Our featured poet this month is X. J. Kennedy. Richard Moore says Kennedy is "one of the best poets we have." Jan Schreiber says "Very little human experience is beyond the range of his keen eye and his well turned lines. We are fortunate to have him working among us." Those of our readers who are fans of Light Quarterly, one of this editor's favorite journals, will already be well acquainted with the work of one of earth's best "unserious poets," so please be sure to thoroughly investigate his poetry page. We've also added a new poem, "The Rusish Baths," by Zyskandar Jaimot.

March 2003: Our featured poet this month is R. S. Gwynn. Dana Gioia has called him "one of the truly talented and original poets of my generation," praising his "depth of feeling and intense lyricality." Richard Wilbur says: "R. S. Gwynn's No Word of Farewell is ... a richly varied, highly accomplished collection from one of our best." X. J. Kennedy says: "A wonderful satirist, a master translator, a keen observer of ironies, Gwynn commands a wide range of forms, some of them daunting in their difficulty. Moreover, he clearly holds with the ancient wisdom that a poem ought to bring gladness. That is why, every time I spy one of his new poems in a magazine, I read it before anything else." On that note, we suggest that you do as Mr. Kennedy does, and without further ado, let us direct you to R. S. Gwynn's poetry page. This month, we're also pleased to publish poems by Terese Coe. Her work includes her own delightfully original poetry and a translation from Pierre de Ronsard. We continue to feature the work of the great Romantic poets and their literary heirs on our Masters page. Also, we'd like to announce the debut of a new literary web site, the home page of The Eclectic Muse. The Eclectic Muse is edited by February's featured poet, Joe M. Ruggier, a poet who has worked tirelessly to promote our kind (and we hope your kind) of poetry: poetry that sings and moves, poetry that embraces rather than denies or defies the traditions of English poetry. If you believe as Joe Ruggier does—that there is a revival of traditional poetry, and that the world is better place for it—then we think you'll find The Eclectic Muse well worth the price of a subscription.—MRB

February 2003: Our featured poet this month is Joe M. Ruggier, a man who has done something to make all bewailers of the "state of the art" of contemporary poetry take note, having sold over 20,000 books, many of them door-to-door, including over 10,000 books he wrote and published himself! Now that's something even Robert Ripley would find truly amazing. We encourage our readers and poets not only to visit Joe's poetry page, but also to support him in his efforts to, as it were, singlehandedly jumpstart the revival of traditional English poetry. Joe was born in Malta and now lives in Richmond, Canada, where in addition to writing English and Maltese poetry and outselling most "major" poetry presses by himself, he is also a literary critic and editor who publishes a fine poetry journal, The Eclectic Muse. As if that isn't enough, Joe has translated the poetry of the Maltese poet George Borg. He's truly a man of many talents (and many hats!). And what better month than February to revisit the work of the great Romantic poets, so on our Masters page we're featuring the work of a number of Romantic poets, from William Blake and Robert Burns to Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, and we've also included two darkly romantic poems by a perhaps unlikely candidate, Robert Frost. In the necessarily humble opinion of this editor, Frost's "Acquainted With The Night" and "Directive" are far darker, more chilling and disturbing, and simply better than anything written by Poe.—MRB

January 2003: Our featured poet this month is Emery Campbell. Emery, in addition to being a talented poet, fiction writer and translator, is active in the Georgia Poetry Society and, like many of the poets who breathe life into the pages of The HyperTexts, is contributing to the current renaissance of traditional poetry by actively encouraging the efforts of other poets. If you like witty poetry and metrical/rhymed poetry, you'll doubly like the poetry of Emery Campbell. Also, at Emery's request, we've added two new poems to our Masters page: "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (of which Emery says, "I find it one of the most poignant and powerful poems I have ever read.") and "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who died in action at the age of 19 on December 11, 1941.

Another poet I've enjoyed swapping e-mails with is Richard Moore. As anyone who visits this page regularly knows by now, I'm a fan of Richard's poetry, and it seems that I'm constantly finding new poems of his (or at least poems of his that are new to me) and asking him for permission to use them for THT. I don't consider myself a critic of poets, just an avid reader of poetry, but if I had to take a stab at naming poets in my ever-widening circle who might come to be highly valued by future generations, Richard Moore would be my first choice. As the editor of THT, I've never subscribed to the "less is more" thing. Instead, I think to myself "best is more," and so we've added three new poems to Richard Moore's poetry page: two that were published recently in Romantics Quarterly, and one that was the lead poem in the most current issue of Edge City Review, a fine journal edited by Terry Ponick, and one that should be on everyone's reading list.—MRB

December 2002: Our featured poet this month is Jennifer Reeser. The featured poet on our Masters page is Elizabeth Bishop. We have also updated Jendi Reiter's poetry page with a picture and information about her first book, A Talent for Sadness. Our congratulations on the book, Jendi! The featured essay on our Essays and Assays page is Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" We have also added a Essays and Assays link to Gioia's follow-up to his essay, titled "Hearing from Poetry's Audience." Gioia's comments about the response to "Can Poetry Matter?" are interesting: "Letters poured into The Atlantic, copies of which they shipped to me in thick bundles. Other mail came to me directly or through my publishers. Reporters phoned at the office for interviews. Newspaper and magazine articles appeared. Radio producers asked me to discuss the article on the air. Friends phoned with anecdotes about the article's impact. Strangers called to ask advice. And for months the mail continued. Eventually I received over 400 letters from Atlantic readers. They were overwhelmingly favorable. Many of them felt I had not gone far enough in criticizing the inbred nature of the poetry world." Fascinating stuff, and we think Dana Gioia is an excellent, excellent choice for the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

November 2002: Our featured poet this month is Harvey Stanbrough, who was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and the 2000 Frankfurt Award. Our newest Contemporary Poet is Jendi Reiter, a most welcome addition. We've also added a new poem/song lyric, "Annette's Song," to Tony Marco's poetry page, and we've also added an interview with Tony to our Essays & Assays page. Correcting a longstanding oversight, we've added a picture of Jan Schreiber to his poetry page. Also, while we're trying to obtain the rights to publish Steve Kowit's timely essay, "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem," here's a link for anyone who wonders, as we often do, why Harold Bloom's critical libido is stirred at the merest whiff of cognitive difficulty. Oh, and by the way—our poets were paid a well-earned compliment by Michael Morton, Director of the Net Poetry and Arts Competition, who recently said: "As I told one of our members, The HyperTexts reads like a 'Who's Who' in contemporary poetry today!" Our sentiments exactly!

October 2002: Our featured poet this month, Leo Yankevich, speaks to us all the way from Gliwice, Poland, while Essays & Assays features Esther Cameron's thought-provoking essay "I, Human" and two essays by Richard Moore: "The Balancer: Yeats and His Supernatural System" and "Poetic Meter in English: Roots and Possibilities." We've also put a few finishing touches on Richard Moore's poetry page, which is one readers should revisit often. And we've added two new poems to Gail White's page: poems that will mercilessly tickle our readers' funnybones. The first poem will remind you of someone you know (perhaps even of poets who've appeared in these pages!). The second will pepper you with sage advice. These are "must reads," folks.

September 2002: Our featured poet this month is Gail White. Also, this month we're pleased to showcase the poetry of Deborah Warren in our Contemporary Poets section. And in our continuing attempt to refute the modern adage "less is more," contending that if the words are good enough, we'd rather have more, not less, we've also added five new poems by Richard Moore: ones you'd be amiss to miss. We've also added a number of poems to our Masters page, and this month we're featuring some of the best love poems of all time, from poets like Roethke, Jonson, Auden, Yeats, Herrick, Bishop and Bogan. Our congratulations to Rhina Espaillat, whose latest book Rehearsing Absence was reviewed (positively, of course) in the September issue of Poetry. Rhina has a problem to which most poets secretly aspire: she's been the topic of so much interest and discussion recently, that, in response to her on-line interview with Poetic Reflections being delayed, she expressed relief, saying, "I don't want readers/viewers to say, 'What, HER again???'" Is that a twinge of empathy we're feeling, or is it the sting of envy?

August 2002: This month's featured poet is Zyskandar A. Jaimot. Our thanks to Noah Hoffenberg, poet and editor of CRUX Literary Magazine, for bringing the poetry of Mr. Jaimot to our attention. Which leads us to thanking Richard Moore for putting us in touch with Mr. Hoffenberg, whose poetry now appears in our Contemporary Poets section. We owe a second round of thanks to Richard Moore for pointing us toward Richard Wakefield, whose poetry also appears under Contemporary Poets, as does that of Jack Butler, who also has a selection of essays on our Essays & Assays page. This month, we've updated our Masters page with poems by Auden, Bishop, Bogan, Baudelaire and Keats, with the latter's poem being suggested to us by Esther Cameron. (Thanks Esther.) We've also updated Patrick Kanouse's page with a picture and two new poems. Patrick is the editor of The Raintown Review, stepping into the position previously held by Harvey Stanbrough. The Raintown Review is a champion of metrical poetry in general and blank verse in particular, so please be sure to support both Mr. Kanouse and his journal with your subscriptions and your submissions.

July 2002: We're running behind on publishing a number of new poets (new to THT, but names many of our visitors will immediately recognize, although we also have a few surprises up our sleeves). Our apologies for the delays, but please console yourselves with our editor's promise that your wait will eventually be worth his weight in gold (discounting, of course, his feet of clay.) In the meantime, we've added a new page we think will be of interest: Essays & Assays. Here, you'll find interviews and essays on "things poetic." We hope to soon add roundtable discussions in which poets scream and pull out their hair debating mindbending things like what the hell "free verse" means, and whether Joseph Salemi has been teaching American Idol's Simon Cowell a few tricks.

June 2002: Our featured poet is Leslie Mellichamp, for the second month. We continue to receive poems and testimonials in the honor of a poet and editor we greatly admired. So please revisit this month's updated Featured Poet page. We have also added a number of poems to our Masters page, and our thanks to Gail White and Zyskandar Jaimot for suggesting the poems debuting at the head of the Masters page this month. Both Ms. White and Mr. Jaimot will be featured poets in upcoming issues of THT. Also, thanks to Allen Heinrich, editor of Carnelian, for two poems ("Exile" by Hart Crane and "No Other Troy" by William Butler Yeats) we "lifted" from his excellent poetry web site. You can find Carnelian, which has published poetry by THT poets Harvey Stanbrough and Jack Granath, on our Links page. In our defense, T. S. Eliot did say, "Mature poets steal."

May 2002: Our featured poet is Leslie Mellichamp, whose death on December 18, 2001 leaves a void poetry will be hard pressed to fill. As the editor of The Lyric, the oldest magazine in North America devoted to traditional poetry, he was one of the standard bearers of accessible metrical poetry when its future seemed, at times, in doubt. In those lean years of the not-too-far-distant past, if a poet had a nice sonnet or villanelle that was languishing unpublished, The Lyric was always a bright prospect: a lighthouse, a star. We are pleased to be able to share Leslie Mellichamp's poetry with you, and if you have a personal testimonial you would like to have added to his poetry page, please e-mail it to Michael R. Burch at mburch@aocg.com. We're also pleased to introduce you to the poetry of Hudson Owen, who appears in our Contemporary Poets section. To show what a small poetic world it is, and also the esteem in which Leslie Mellichamp's journal is held, Hudson Owen listed The Lyric first among his publication credits. Many poets have done the same throughout the years. Also, we've added a new poem by Tony Marco, "Sabillasville Sonnet 3." And we've updated Rhina Espaillat's bio: she now has four books, including Rehearsing Absence, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Congratulations, Rhina!

March 2002: Our featured poet is A. M. Juster. We have also added Wendy Taylor Carlisle to our Contemporary Poets section. We have a fine slate of poets who will be added next month, including Jack Butler, Noah Hoffenberg, Hudson Owen, Deborah Warren and Richard Wakefield. We continue to be encouraged by the publication of accessible metrical poetry in journals like Poetry, Harvard Review (which recently used a poem by THT poet Joyce Wilson), Atlanta Review, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, and many others. And we're greatly encouraged by the fact that several poetry sites now attract thousands of visitors each month. Web sites like www.poets.org and www.ablemuse.com continue to grow and thrive. But there are thousands of poetry sites that are flourishing, and there is incredible demand for poetry on the Internet. For instance, "poetry" was recently the number eight search term for an entire year on Lycos, ahead of "football," "golf," "wrestling" and most of the "sex kittens." Amazing, but true. Yahoo! had to cancel an on-line poetry bash due to overwhelming demand, and Yahoo! has pretty decent broadcast capabilities. In an attempt to get the word out about "our kind" of poets to an increasingly attentive world, THT editor Michael R. Burch will be conducting a series of monthly interviews for Poetic Reflections. Each month, starting in April, we'll provide a URL to the current interview. The first interview will be with Richard Moore, one of our favorite contemporary poets, time and schedules permitting, so please "stay tuned!"

February 2002: Our featured poet is Rhina P. Espaillat. We have also added Anton N. (Tony) Marco to our Contemporary Poets section, and Tony will be the featured poet in an upcoming issue of The HyperTexts. There is one major change to our format: we have consolidated the poems of the Masters onto one page. We did this to make it easier for visitors to find our Contemporary Poets pages. We have also updated our Links page; there are now several outstanding Formalist poetry sites which appear early in our listings. Speaking of links, we were paid a wonderful compliment by Chris Beaulieu, editor of Poetic Reflections. Chris decided to cull his links down to the best three, and THT made the cut. Since Poetic Reflections itself was named one of the top three poetry web sites by none other than Writer's Digest, we were obviously quite pleased. We were even more pleased when Chris noted that the content of THT is "awesome." On another note, professor Kevin N. Roberts, editor of Romantics Quarterly, is looking for traditional poetry that shows the influence of the great Romantic Poets. If you're interested in submitting to Romantics Quarterly, please contact Michael R. Burch.

January 2002: Our featured poet is Jan Schreiber. We have completely revamped the Contemporary Poets section to make it easier to find the poets. Contemporary Poets are now listed alphabetically. In the past, we had tried to maintain groupings (Formalist, New Romantic, Free Verse), but as our roster of poets has grown, the lines of distinction have blurred, however pleasingly, and an alphabetized list will probably be easier on both our visitors and the editor, who became famous (or is it infamous?) for not being able to decide who went where with the old method. Also, due to popular demand (or at least an occasional inquiry), you can now find the editor's picture by clicking here. In the February version of THT, we hope to combine the Masters into one page, which will push the Featured Poet and Contemporary Poet sections toward the top of the index.

December 2001: Our featured poet is Claudia Gary Annis. We have updated our Rock Jukebox Page, and we hope you'll check it out. We are adding a number of excellent Contemporary Poets in the near future, including George Amabile, Anton (Tony) Marco, Hudson Owen, and Jan Schreiber, so please visit us again soon!

November 2001: Our featured poet is Richard Moore. We have updated our Links Page to show the THT poets who have been published by the various poetry journals and web sites listed. We also want to congratulate Mary Rae for winning the first prize in the first annual Raintown Review Awards poetry contest, which was jointly sponsored by THT. A special note of congratulation is in order to THT poet Joseph S. Salemi, who was the only poet to have two poems among the finalists. Also, THT poet Michael R. Burch won the Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest, sponsored by Romantics Quarterly, with Carmen Willcox finishing second and Mary Rae the first runner up.

Prior to November 2001: Our first featured poet was Richard Moore, as noted above. Prior to November 2001, THT didn't have issues, per se, and was not updated on a monthly basis, but merely upon the caprice of its founder and editor (i.e. me, Mike Burch). When did THT start? I don't rightly remember! But I was able to use the Wayback Machine to find the earliest extant version of THT, circa March 2001. At that time we had separate pages for the Masters; they included Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Ernest Dowson, Robert Frost, A. E. Housman, Ben Jonson, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilfred Owen, E. A. Robinson, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, and W. B. Yeats. Our first cadre of contemporary poets included Harvey Stanbrough, Annie Finch, A. E. Stallings (the first "big fish" we landed), Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, William F. Carlson, Jennifer Reeser, Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, and Michael R. Burch. From April to October 2001 we added the following contemporary poets: Roger Hecht, Louise Jaffe, Esther Cameron, Jack Granath, Carmen Willcox, Dr. Alfred Dorn, Wade Newman, Patrick Kanouse, Joyce Wilson, Mary Rae (the winner of our first and only poetry contest), Ric Masten and Ursula T. Gibson. In the early days, Bill Carlson was a godsend, as he put us in touch, either directly or indirectly through his website and its links to Expansive Poetry & Music Online, with roughly half the poets we published in our formative days: himself, Dorn, Salemi, Cameron, Newman, Hecht (via Newman, his literary executor), Jaffe, Granath, Reeser and Richard Moore. The second largest "pool" of poets came from to us from the ranks of the New Romantics: Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, Carmen Willcox and Mary Rae. We found Harvey Stanbrough through The Raintown Review, which he founded and was still editing at the time. Some poets we found through the "grapevine" and the Internet: Stallings, Finch, Wilson, Masten, Gibson. We found Kanouse either through Carlson or Stanbrough.

Just when was The HyperTexts originally created? I'm not sure. Probably between 1998 and 2000, since the site already had considerable content in early 2001, with a total of 21 poets in its Masters and Contemporary Poets indexes, not to mention fairly extensive Esoterica and Rock Jukebox pages. In July 2004 we recorded our hit counter for the first time: 16,787. But I don't remember when I added it, so any number of early hits were probably not recorded. In four months of 2008 alone, THT had around 30,000 hits on its main page. So our readership has obviously grown dramatically. We seem to get as many hits in four months as we once did in four years.

Why did I start The HyperTexts? Again, I really don't remember. I know I bought a copy of Microsoft Frontpage, the program I used to create THT, probably just before the turn of century, in order to edit the website of the software company I own, Alpha Omega Consulting Group, Inc. At the time Alpha Omega had a programmer, Steve Harris, who had experience designing websites, so I imagine I bought the program on his recommendation. Steve left Alpha Omega toward the end of 2000, so I suppose around that time I had to take over editing the company website. So perhaps I created THT in order to learn the basics of HTML. It would have been natural for me to create a literary website, as a way of learning my way around HTML, because whenever I needed to learn a new programming language, I always started with something functional that I had the expertise to design and critique. I doubt that I had any real intention of being an editor and publisher of poetry at the time. I do remember getting in contact with A. E. (Alicia) Stallings and asking if I could publish a few of her poems. Her graciousness no doubt encouraged me to "go after" other poets. Annie Finch and Harvey Stanbrough were other poets I admired who gave me permission to publish their poems. Through my connection with Michael Pendragon, who published my poems in the literary journals Penny Dreadful and Songs of Innocence and the poetry anthology The Bible of Hell, I met Kevin N. Roberts, the founder and editor of Romantics Quarterly. As I helped Kevin get Romantics Quarterly off the ground, with financial assistance and suggestions, I began to see something of a larger role for myself, in the grand scheme of things, and THT soon became a launching pad of sorts for literary journals on tight budgets that didn't have their own websites. Those were the days before every man and his dog had a blog.

In 2002 I published Rhina Espaillat, and over the years she has helped THT publish the work of a number of her fellow Powow River Poets, including Michael Cantor, Deborah Warren, Len Krisak, Mike Juster and Midge Goldberg.

In 2002 I published Jack Butler, the first poet in an "Arkansas connection" that now includes Jack, Greg Alan Brownderville, Jim Barnes, and R. S. (Sam) Gwynn.

In early 2003 I ran free advertisements for Joe Ruggier's literary journal, The Eclectic Muse, and for his collection of books on CD, which my software company helped Joe create. My relationship with Joe soon led THT to join forces with Joe's Multicultural Books (MBooks) imprint, and before long we had published books by Emery Campbell, Zyskandar Jaimot, T. Merrill and V. Ulea, with hopefully more to come.

Also in 2003 I published Yala Korwin, a Holocaust survivor, and soon with the help of Yala and Esther Cameron, THT was able to bring a number of poems by Jewish ghetto poets and other Holocaust poets that had never appeared in English before. Our early Holocaust pages included those of Janusz Korczak and Elie Wiesel, which were published in 2004.

In 2005, I published the work of T. (Tom) Merrill, and this was the beginning of yet another fruitful relationship. Tom has devoted much time to THT, and he is now our Poet in Residuum. In addition to gracing our pages with his poems, essays and poet intros, Tom is a proofreader par excellence. And he has directed us to a number of poets we wouldn't have known about otherwise, including Agnes Wathall, Eunice de Chazeau and Mary Malone.

In 2006, I published the poetry of Jeffery Woodward, and he has gone on to contribute a number of pages to our "Blasts from the Past" series, earning a honorable mention on our masthead. And so THT's editors and associates now consist of me, Tom, Joe and Jeffrey.

As I pen this retrospective (written on December 12, 2008), THT ranks in the top ten with Google for a number of our primary search terms: the hypertexts (#1), hypertexts (#2), formal poetry (#2), contemporary formal poetry (#3), "the Masters" poetry (#2), Darfur poetry (#1), Holocaust poetry (#10), ghetto poets (#2), Nelson Mandela poetry (#1), Elie Wiesel poetry (#1), Leonard Nimoy poetry (#1), Ronald Reagan poetry (#1), Pope John Paul II poetry (#1), Karol Wojtyla poetry (#1), Nadia Anjuman poetry (#1 and #2), Miklós Radnóti poetry (#1), Formalist poetry (#5). And we're ranked extremely high by Google for searches for many of the poets we've published: X. J. Kennedy poetry (#1), Richard Moore poetry (#1 and #2), Esther Cameron poetry (#1 and #2), George Held poetry (#1), Jack Butler poetry (#3 and #4), Ethna Carbery poetry (#3), etc.

In a few cases, such as Richard Moore's and Esther Cameron's, we even rank above the poets' personal and/or literary websites. And in many cases, we rank number one with Google in searches for our poets' names, sans modifiers, as with Eunice de Chazeau, Alfred Dorn, Rhina P. Espaillat, Roger Hecht, George Held, T. S. Kerrigan, Yala Korwin, Leslie Mellichamp, Robert Mezey, Joseph S. Salemi, and Agnes Wathall, just to drop a few names. These are men and women with serious accomplishments, so it's interesting to see THT ranking number one, even above Wikipedia, as we sometimes do.

Where will THT go from here? Perhaps as high and far as Google can help us fly . . .

Mike Burch
December 12, 2008

The HyperTexts