{"product_id":"2940013065086","title":"LEARN FROM THE LEAVES","description":"FROM THE PREFACE: Being the not really so wild and wily (I just like the sound of the words), but the definitely eclectic, hopefully wise and no doubt frequently outrageous meanderings down the sinuous roadways of one poor versifier’s long and not uneventful journey through seven tenths of the twentieth century, in the end tip-toeing warily into both a new millennium and old age. Just words of course, all just so many words. But words strung slyly, judiciously, and always lovingly one after the other in due order and in such a way as to entertain, sometimes astonish, and, the poet hopes, occasionally enlighten the literate, or even otherwise, reader; all cast in diverse poetical schemes ranging from the formal (in the sense of well-formed) classical pentameter of Milton or Tennyson to unformed lines to satisfy even the postiest of moderns; but in fact most of the lines herein actually — can it be? — scan, and many — oh no! — even rhyme, sometimes obviously, sometimes merely hinted at in surprising ways, recalling Wallace Stevens’s remark that “one writes poetry out of a delight in the harmonious and orderly”; one will find here blank verse, heroic couplets, a touch of ottava rima, numerous sonnets of various styles, even, just for fun, a limerick and a finicky double dactyl; also a strictly structured rondelet or two, brief cinquains (although, to be sure, nary a single hyaku), some rowdy cowboy poetry and other diverse schemes nearly as numerous as the pages herein; including, as mentioned, for dogma’s sake, one or two with no scheme at all; the scheme depending, possibly, on the barometric pressure, the whim of the muse, the poet’s mood of the moment or, more likely, on the voice of the nascent poem’s embryonic cries; all by one solitary poet who believes — contrary to specious edict, seemingly self-negating, that there are no rules — that there are and they are: that a poem must be (a) enlightening (preferably on several levels); (b) fun (for both poet and reader); (c) not, and always more than, prose; and (d) wonderful in the literal sense, that is, in Marianne Moore’s phrase, “rooted in imaginative awe”; thus, to recursively quote a self-example herein: “Just say there must be something there. \/ Just say it’s both comfort and despair.”","brand":"THE TICKING ROSE PRESS","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47163923431664,"sku":"2940013065086","price":1.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013065086_p0.jpg?v=1763576416","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013065086","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}