Frank X. Gaspar

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. New Books read.

How to write specific forms:
Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka.
Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát.
Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. Anne Carson.
The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise.
Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Chase Twichell. Corey Marks.
François Villon Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet.
Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jean Vengua. J. Zimmerman. J. Zimmerman (haiku).
Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan.
Laureate Poets: Britain; USA.
Len Anderson. Les Murray. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Louise Glück.
Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Richard Hugo. Robert Bly.
Sappho. Sara Teasdale. Shiki (haiku). Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn.
Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Night of a Thousand Blossoms (poems).

Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004) by Frank X. Gaspar.

I like many of his poems, admire his willingness to use words not often used in poetry, and enjoy both his frequent "pathetic fallacies" and his indulgence in adjectives.

His fourth collection of verse.
Presented in three titled sections.
Sensual poems. Specific data in statistics below.

Favorite poems include:

"Bright Wings" (p. 6), which starts:

  
  There I was walking in the garden looking for the intermediaries  
  between me and the clear light.

"That Blue Rondo" (p. 11), which starts:

  
  So where are all the planks in reason and those tapestries of paradise?  
  For I'm alone in the world and beyond even the most depraved
  touch, here where there is no other life than in poems

"Flags are Flying Everywhere" (p. 54), which starts:

  
  How public this sudden happiness, how unseemly,
  the sun getting low in the west beyond the Boeing office towers

"Don't You Want to Walk Out Among the Lilies?" (p. 57), which starts:

  
  It must be one measure of the global warming, how all
  the little bookstores have gone away, and now there is only one  
  bright gaping cavern of books

"Tonight It's a Word" (p. 59), which starts:

  
  My joints are throbbing from holding my body together. It's
  the only way, some nights, I know I'm alive. I am profoundly  
  happy. Keats is here in his letters,

"Green" (p. 62), which starts:

  
  And so I swam out to where the turtles live
  about a half mile off shore where the bottom
  is lava and coral and stuck with canyons of white sand.

Acknowledges first publications in:
- Bellingham Review
- Café Review
- Gavea-Brown Journal
- Georgia Review
- Green Mountains Review
- Harvard Review
- Kenyon Review
- Mid-American Review
- Mosaic
- Pearl
- Perihelion
- Prima Anthology
- Prairie Schooner
- Quarterly West
- Revista Neo (Azores)
- Saber, Suplemento Acoriano de Artes e Letras
- Solo 5
- Southeast Review
- Tampa Review
Sample statistics:
- 45 poems, 56 pages, average of 1.2 pages per poem.
- Pages per poem, the mode is 1 pages (34 poems); 11 poems are 2 pages.
- Stanzas per poem: all are single-stanza poems.
- Lines per poem (first 10 poems), the mode is 29 lines. The mean is 29.4 lines per poem (25 to 36 lines).
- Syllables per line: the lines are of regular length on the page, reaching almost the page width, and heavily enjambed. For a rough count, 7 lines were take in a convenience quasi-random sample of 2 or 3 lines from each section. They give: a mode of 17 syllables per line, a mean of 15.4 syllables per line, and a range of 12 to 18 syllables.
- Lots of sensual words. The first 10 poems have:
  - sound: in 100% of the poems.
  - touch: in 90% of the poems.
  - taste: in 80% of the poems.
  - color: in 60% of the poems; includes 'buttery' and 'gruel-colored'; 'green' and 'grey' occur the most frequently (3 times each); the average is 1.7 words per poem.
  - smell: in 50% of the poems.
  Contrast this with the sensory-rich writing of Aleda Shirley in Averno and the less sensory writing of Louise Glück in Averno.
- Use of punctuation in first 10 poems:
  - question mark: used in 100% of the poems; mean 5.0 per poem; range 0 to 10.
  - em-dash: used in 90% of the poems; mean 1.9 per poem; range 0 to 5.
  - italics: used in 50% of the poems; mean 1.3 per poem; range 0 to 4.
  - colon: used in 40% of the poems; mean 0.5 per poem; range 0 to 2.
  - exclamation mark: used in 20% of the poems; mean 0.3 per poem; range 0 to 2.
  - semicolon: used in 0% of the poems; mean 0 per poem.
- Poems that address 'you' explicitly: 60% of the first 10 poems:

Links and Books.

Links and Books.

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