Verse by Caleb Mannan

If you like Robert Service, Longfellow, Tolkien, Milton, Robinson Jeffers, Whitman, Poe, The Bible, Tennyson, Ray Bradbury, life, death, Untermeyer, Pound, Donne, joy, sorrow, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, children, beauty, Dante, Tom Waits, then set yourself down beside this fire.

Friday, January 13, 2012

January Chill

When we first moved to the mountains
we rolled up our pants and waded in the creek,
cold to the bone,
searching for fool's gold,
until our mothers scolded us
for the January chill

Longfellow's Beard


After last year of much 'poetry' and finishing my third novel, I grew sick of hearing myself think. After I finished my novel, and had edited and sent it to my beta readers (where it now currently resides), I felt the need to write still, but as I said before, I was sick of my own thoughts.
The solution, of course, was to read Robert Graves and some novels and write poetry that was stripped to the bone.
So, for 2012, I purpose that if I should write my verses of wheat and wildflowers, I should strip them to their necessity(and even less), to say as much with as little as I could.
I shall call this new collection of stripped verse 'Longfellow's Beard'.

That is all.