Tag Archives: Richard Osler

From May 2022, The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems – Part Four

                                          A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck — Ilya Kaminsky from A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on its Way to the Neck from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019 […]

Doorways Out of Time – A Tribute to David Lloyd Blackwood (Nov. 7th, 1941-July 2nd, 2022) by Way of a Story of an Art Collection and a Friendship

(All artwork images in this post with permission and Copyright David Blackwood Inc.) On July 2nd, the nationally and internationally acclaimed Canadian/Newfoundland artist David Blackwood(1941-2022) died at home in Port Hope, Ontario. He was eighty years old. But his artistic voice will continue to speak through his body of work that will likely rank among […]

Czeslaw Milosz – A Tribute – Part Two – A Poem to Honour the Men and Women in Ukraine in Wartime, February 2022

Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of […]

What Will Not Let Me Forget – A Personal Story of a Poem and Synchronicity (Meaningful Coincidence)

In a series of synchronistic events a poem I wrote has come back to me more than thirty years after I wrote it and almost twenty years since I had disavowed it and forgotten it! I had forgotten that a dear friend, Sarah Wilson, copied out the poem in her distinctive and wonderful script with […]

Making Poetry Out of the Poetry, The Poetic Prose, of Arundhati Roy – an Erasure Poem by Richard Osler

An Erasure This thing happened, a virus, yes, but more, than a virus…the mighty kneel, the world halts, trying to stitch future to past, refusing the rupture, the rupture, this terrible despair, a chance to rethink the dooms worse than a pandemic. Imagine a portal, a gateway. We can drag carcasses, prejudices and hatred, avarice, […]

Provenance of a Small Poem of Mine – With Thanks to Jane Hirschfield and Hanif Abdurraqib

Umbria: Poet as Diviner; Umbria: Write Poetry for Nine Days and Make Books on the Final Day; Umbria: Visit a Town or City Most Days – Umbria: Have Fun – June 21st to 22nd, 2020

THE DIVINER Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick That he held tight by the arms of the V: Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck Of water, nervous, but professionally Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. The rod jerked with precise convulsions, Spring water suddenly broadcasting Through a green hazel its […]

A Very Poetry Poem for National Poetry Month – Richard Osler

Two Poets Divorce I want Cohen! No, I want him. You take Dickinson. No! I want Wilkinson. OK, OK, take them. I don’t care. Just leave me Gilbert, Ginsberg, Hass, Hirschfield, Hoagland. and Hughes. Grass is greener when Whitman sings it. Take that! And Plath. But I want Wah, Wallace ,Williams – C.K.,W.C., and Hugo. […]

The Bigness of Small Poems – #43 in a Series -This Morning, a Yellow Wheelbarrow

This Morning, a Yellow Wheelbarrow I hear the chords, the deep thrum, from a yellow wheelbarrow on its side after snow in a morning garden. The light singing there, yellow on yellow, blazes, an incandescence not dependent on anything or anyone. Richard Osler, unpublished I don’t as a general rule post my own poems on […]

Built to Bend – A Poem by Jala al-Din Rumi and One in Response by Me (Richard Osler)

  Today like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love Be what we do. There are hundred’s of ways to kneel and kiss the earth. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) from The Big Red […]