Gregg Glory

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]

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)