Gregg G. Brown

This Broken Shore is a literary journal featuring New Jersey-connected writers. It includes poetry, literary history, book reviews, essays, and short fiction. Featured authors include Robert Pinsky, Thomas Reiter, Michael Waters, Emanuel di Pasquale, Susanna Rich, Alexander Dickow, Boni Joi, and others. It also includes art by Ronna Lebo, Katie Anne Stone, Rachel Weeks, and Jared Weeks.

This Broken Shore is an annual literary journal, featuring poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and theater reviews from writers connected to New Jersey.

A collection of ekphrastic poetry, along with a section of poems reflecting on the poet's inspiration, or lack thereof.According to "The Poetry Foundation" An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the "action" of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.

Collected plays in verse of Gefg Glory Gregg G. brown]

Jersey Shore Poets is a poetry writing group that meets once a month at the Eatontown Public Library. It is now in its seventh year. The purpose of the group is to provide a supportive environment for local working poets in the Monmouth County, New Jersey to write, revise and critique their writing as well as to provide information, feedback and support to hone their craft and to seek various opportunities for public reading and publishing. The group also encourages and promotes the writing and appreciation of poetry through various local readings and instructional events.This year, for the first time, JSP has published an anthology, Jersey Shore Poets/First Edition. By the title of this anthology, you might think that this is a collection of writing about the Jersey shore, but it is oh so much more than that It includes not only of the written work of its twelve members, but the work of over thirty five nationally renowned poets and writers, a group that includes two US Poet Laureates as well as three Pulitzer Prize winners.

Flatterers Among the RosesDoes the moon sail in its sumptuous heavenDisfigured by pity, Blindly tearful in an icy lair?To walk in the moonlight, to trodThe verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, What sort of matter for a poem is that?Is it a matter of having nothingIn the mind, icy sequesterOf nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence?Or is it a matter, ratherOf nothingness icily conceived, icily meant?It is a matter of sinister consequence.To walk in the violet moonlightDiscussing the moon from which it flaresDisfiguring the rosesIs a kind of nothing, a suaveHollowness that we may hold nearOr suspend between us as we walk.O savage celestial, misty moon, Snarling in your lair, speak, If speak you must, in dismal syllablesSome more blatant human meaning.

Circumnavigating the Medulla OblongataA note concerning the basic attitude of this book of stories.The story-telling of a stained-glass window. The minutae of a moment recorded through a fly's eye. The strange tales and weird memos of a modern-day Moses. All these are closer to the spirit of the stories in this collection than the usual DOs and DON'Ts of the narrative art. There's a freedom of freak-dom in being a miniaturist of the psyche, a landscape artist with the pallatte of a portrait painter. Rules are more like napkin sketches of escape plans to cross some foreign border at night, the rain tumbling against the passenger train's oblong panes, the moon no more than a rumor. Gregg GloryJanuary, 2014

FROM THE "Brief Introduction" Life's bright season, tho' brief, Proves long enough to growTrue love, real grief.Here is no pinwheel of variety, no rainbow spectrum discoursing with the white radiance of eternity. Here is concentration, strippages of spirit to their ghostly essence, the "skull beneath the skin" whose grin gives no joy, and whose aspect refuses escape. Within this enforced "simplicity" of style, however, there are themes and memes enough to fill a tangled estuary with dazzle when an oblique dawn condescends to hit it just right.Youth is famously a time to indulge unwise ambitions, and I was no different than a thousand other pocket Napoleons unfolding before the dunce public vast batteplans of conquest that had been concocted by solitary candlelight. Here, too, are dreams of lovers, newscaster commentary on current events glazed over with a punk rocker's dyspeptic gaze, and a cubby stuffed with history notes where Spengler and Nietzsche dance a dark mambo.FROM THE POEM "Unimagined Things" The world must change if we but imagine it. ...Einstein knew that his equation unraveled no new sky-That were indifferent-but was a chant to change his mind.Unimagined things grow real, grow real.

Prose aesthetic and malefic. Occasional essays and digressions surging up from the source. I'm tempted to say that this retrospective collection of thoughts and scribbles will veer from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. But that would be a slur on the creator, and so I shall refrain from such malignity. Often, very often, I've been told that I over-introduce my tropical topics with a blizzard of disguising digressions. I'm informed variously that this is helpful, too helpful, not helpful at all, and by Jacko Monahan to "just shut up and read da po-EM." Inexplicably, I'm collecting these various thought-episodes into a prose collection of essays and introductions (and, here and there, a stray letter let loose in the direction of an attentive ear). One feels that these tidbits and tiddlywinks must fare better on their own than when attached like an irreverent dingy to the magisterial ship of a book of verse. Many of the vagrant flares can already be spotted skimming the skies of my website (gregglory.com), or falling among the reeds of my various collections of poems. I've dusted them off and re-written them for the sake of coherency and tang. What was only hinted at before in the emergent wood of a metaphor has now been hunted down and turned into trophies.

The old blue storm-signGets spray-painted over in red: Get lost Irene Sandy. I have never liked to travel, having a dislike of the confusion of new scenes, but I find myself hamstrung at home as well with a deep sense of offended opprobrium at the repetitiousness of the local rituals of the Jersey Shore-beginning with Bar A and ending with the not-quite-naked strip joints like Untouchables that used to line Highway 35 up toward South Amboy. Too lazy to travel, I wait for the busy weatherTo come knocking.

From the Intro: This assemblage of sonnets is neither a trumpet of blind praise, nor a morose ogling of the pains of passion. It is more on the order of an exploration of the situation of love. Of being subjectively in love, and, more objectively, of loving someone besides oneself. So, there are eager rehearsals of coming joys and somber reappraisals of old impious passions both in this collection.The biographical circumstances are simply that I had an intuition that I was on the cusp of some new union with love; there was a dating service, fresh faces and swaying ladies; a kiss occurred, other details.Spring has arrived with its brash boings and raindrop doings GGB, March 15-April 15, 2012My other books on CreateSpace are: createspace.com/3842640 Of flares, of flowers (142 erotic sonnets)createspace.com/3679722Greetings from Mt. Olympus (Collected poems)createspace.com/3671917 Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God (Travel Notes and Prose Poems in the spirit of Basho)createspace.com/3646295 Evil Interludes (Novella inspired by the life of the French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire)createspace.com/3679708 The Singing Well (YA coming-of-age novel)

Collected poems of Gregg Glory Gregg G. Brown]Questioning Is QuestingWestern civilization is in a cul-de-sac. At the end of that cul-de-sac is a guillotine. Beside that guillotine stands the hulking executioner in his greasy black hood. Through that hood peer two red, maddened eyes. Below those eyes, as through a lazy tear, shows a long, slavering wolf-thin grin. Lightning stitches knots in the dead, leaden skies. Thunder interrupts the prayers for the dead. Doom. DOOM. DOOM.Even so, my life is filled with primroses and wishes. I sit here--or lie, rather, languid as an American Oblamov rolled in his snoozy comforter-- building my empire of words.I've spent long, sad years loving people I never could come to know. Strangers whose alien minds lived other lives, pattering after petty pursuits I never really could come to understand. Now I fear that my own kindness and lack of company has led me, in an easy dream of desperation, to see Helen in every barmaid's face.Cold are the coals I have gathered, betrayed by a generous impulse that led me to love first and question second. Over evil rapids I have roved, slouching to the salt dissolution of the sea, who should have been climbing heavenward with Manfred--my eye upon some solitary cloud-wracked peak where every subtle shifting shape suggests a new, unborn greatness (or an old noble greatness renewed) to the seeker's keen and lonely imagination. Instead, I have sunk my mind among warm elbows at a crowded table, seeking fellowship in banal company and dissipating what genius drifts to me in shrunken rounds of tavern talk. Few have been the companions time has tested true. I recall my Mom, downed in her home hospital bed and not the bed of her marriage, pointing at my nose with a red, imperious finger, demanding first and foremost (loved son or no) that I "tell it true."To that improbable pipsqueak queen, crippled yet proud as the devil in her flowered hospital gown--and to her regal charge--I keep my pledge.I do not condemn others for my misjudgments, but, looking at the litter of years, I begin to perceive that there was something of method in my mismeasure. Questioning is questing. Leaving a question open encourages all comers to the query to have the experience of exploration; each hypothesis is happy to go unconfirmed, as long as the hypotenuse is mutually traveled by writer and reader in the coracle of a quatrain. There is something of Emerson in this energy of questioning, but none of his faith in God's final ground, the rock of reality.May such dubious wisdom as my pain has gathered serve me well henceforward. May the narrowing of possibilities sharpen my focus, as when a saltine's pinhole, brought close to the eye, removes the blur of distant things, clarifying every tiny difference and shutting out peripheral static.It is only now, as this labor of years surrounds me on every desktop, that I am coming to feel that the best strength of my youth has been wasted elaborating a maze of quizzes instead of attempting to soar, however falteringly, into the omniscient sun. Was it a deficit of pride that had me prefer puzzles to plumage? Or some more insidious hidden desire to be touted and touched instead of respected and feared? Well, here I am again, ending each sentence with my shepherd's crook (?) instead of the thunder god's triumphant stab and pang So much of our humanity is mist and mystery; so many of our hours slide by in incapable ignorance. But what makes our lives worth the sinning that created them is the moment the mirror comes clear, as if in a revelation, and every face confronts the tragedy of its character.

"When the Moon Melts"The dwarf's hideous face retreated from the basement window, an array of grimy grey whiskers and a radish nose."When the moon meltsAnd the Gods of Autumn roamEvil and good are equally feltAnd nothing certain is known,"Chanted Mr. Plimsoul and the lady together. Wild shadows flickered around them, and they gestured toward the shut box, black and shiny as a beetle's back. They seemed to be trying to compel the box to open or spontaneously erupt in flame...or something."Casket of Augersaal, I command you: open " Mr. Plimsoul shouted, making a weird gesture at the box."By Neamiahas' eye, by Qyudditch's kin, I say: unfasten " the lady hissed, her boa and her long arms gesturing in the flickering light of the braziers.The casket hopped on the sawhorses once, as if a person inside were being tickled or kicked, and then was still. A thin jet of purple smoke sizzled from one end of the casket... and then stopped.My other books on CreateSpace are: createspace.com/3842640 Of flares, of flowers (142 erotic sonnets)createspace.com/3679722Greetings from Mt. Olympus (Collected poems)createspace.com/3671917 Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God (Travel Notes and Prose Poems in the spirit of Basho)createspace.com/3646295 Evil Interludes (Novella inspired by the life of the French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire)createspace.com/3679708 The Singing Well (YA coming-of-age novel)

JOHN MUIR'S AUGUST HEADJohn Muir's queer and sundry quotations and exclamations shine through pane after pane of Yosemite Valley's buildings. Less a ghost and more of a sacred mascot, his bearded visage seems to hang down from every shaggy tree and to impose itself in the crinkled cliff-shadows on every side of this immense religious fosse into which tourists pour as amply as blood or wine. "How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountain " "I never saw a discontented tree." "The mountains are calling, and I must go."My other books on CreateSpace are: createspace.com/3842640 Of flares, of flowers (142 erotic sonnets)createspace.com/3679722Greetings from Mt. Olympus (Collected poems)createspace.com/3671917 Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God (Travel Notes and Prose Poems in the spirit of Basho)createspace.com/3646295 Evil Interludes (Novella inspired by the life of the French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire)createspace.com/3679708 The Singing Well (YA coming-of-age novel)