Nov. 27th, 2012 05:33 pm
New Work - Avatars of Wizardry
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klwardI am delighted to report on the latest release from P'rea Press, who brought out my collection of last year, The Land of Bad Dreams. I only have one poem in this, but my it's a long one.
This is only fitting, for the "Wizardry" of the title is George Sterling's 1904 masterpiece "A Wine of Wizardry", that is here reprinted in all its incarnadine glory. This is the kind of poem that surpasses literature and becomes experience. I'm not claiming to have matched it, but "Lucubration" was selected by the editor as a suitable running-mate, along with my friend Leigh Blackmore's "A Fragment from the Book of Wyvern".
"Lucubration" is a word I discovered in an dictionary published in 1901. Its meaning is given as "study or composition protracted late into the night: a product of such study: a composition that smells of the lamp." If that's a not a poem waiting to happen, I don't know what is.
This is only fitting, for the "Wizardry" of the title is George Sterling's 1904 masterpiece "A Wine of Wizardry", that is here reprinted in all its incarnadine glory. This is the kind of poem that surpasses literature and becomes experience. I'm not claiming to have matched it, but "Lucubration" was selected by the editor as a suitable running-mate, along with my friend Leigh Blackmore's "A Fragment from the Book of Wyvern".
"Lucubration" is a word I discovered in an dictionary published in 1901. Its meaning is given as "study or composition protracted late into the night: a product of such study: a composition that smells of the lamp." If that's a not a poem waiting to happen, I don't know what is.
"A most perplexing paradox, to write
so late at night with such a light as this
banishing darkness from the magic ring;
but day thoughts are not night thoughts..."