Identity
We all have each a thousand different selves in our first years, and then we lose a few. One would have gone to India, to live
a sacred life, another would have sought heavenly mansions, lit on summer nights. At least one lived out in the wilderness
alone, watching the seasons’ cycles change. And several would have searched for ecstasy: a hundred days of festivals each year
to dress ourselves in carnival costumes lost in a reverie of swirling dance. A couple more would dwell in lotus land
drinking Lethean waters to forget all those lost selves, and all the things they’ve done for good or ill: they’re all ephemeral
they fade away, we’re left with only us walking a single path towards those hills off in the distance as the dusk arrives.
Aesthetics
This is my daily practice. Is it art? I ask myself, as I sit down to write a poetry of witness for our lives:
measures of love and loss and suffering? She will not pass unnoticed into dark: our names are linked as long as verse endures.
Others have gone through much and hid their pain. Issa: “This dewdrop world. And yet. And yet.” He lost his daughter, but he barely spoke.
“Pity and terror,” Aristotle says? “To make laugh, and to hurt,” said Berryman, “To terrify and comfort” with brief words?
Li Po, folding his poems into boats. Du Fu, whose songs record experience Human, modest, exact, and beautiful.
I think most of a woman I don’t know just diagnosed, and reading these to learn How others went before her and survived.
When W.F. Lantry’s wife, Kate, was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in April 2022, she asked him to write one poem a day, to chronicle her journey. He’s kept it up through all the biopsies and ultrasounds, two courses of chemo, surgery and at this writing the beginning of radiation. The first volume of these poems, The Cancer Diaries – Book One: Flood Warning appeared in January 2023. His other poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, and The Language of Birds (2011). He received his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors’ Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), Comment Magazine Poetry Award (Canada), Paris/Atlantic Young Writers Award (France), Old Red Kimono Paris Lake Poetry Prize and Potomac Review Prize. His work has appeared widely online and in print. He is the editor of Peacock Journal.