BY JEDIDIAH PASCHALL
Claude Monet upended public opinion of what good art was well over a century ago. Monet had a different vision of the world. The world wasn’t just a real place to be captured by the artist’s brush. Monet’s courageous point of view saw the world as sacred, dynamic, connected, and full of light. To this […]
Read MoreIntroduction It might be narcissistically indulgent to provide an introduction for my own work, but I ask the reader to bear with me. Usually, I don’t try to offer much commentary on my poetry. However, Sketches for a Wasted Youth represents a certain crossroads for me as a Christian of the mystical persuasion […]
Read MoreThe first language of poetry is silence. All art begins with the imposing vacuum of the blank canvas. All music must spring forth from inaudible melodies. Before the truth of nature or the Divine can be grasped, the creative mind must be inclined to the vacant spaces. For one to discover meaning in shafts of […]
Read MoreThere are few poems in the English language as bone-chilling as WB Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. This year marks the century anniversary of a poem that captivated and terrified the modern world. One needn’t be familiar with Yeats’ Irish nationalism, Theosophical inclinations, or his occultism to gain entrance into his imagistic rendering of the collapse […]
Read MoreI first read these words in the basement level of a Chicago bookstore close to twenty years ago and I knew Lisel Mueller was a woman to be trusted: In Passing How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to […]
Read MoreI am not a learned man, as I sit in this empty room I admit the diplomas on my wall are certificates of debt – nothing more; perhaps if my learning did not come through an untamed curiosity and fits of wild distraction I could speak higher of my higher education. My library is […]
Read MoreIt’s hard to live somewhere in between the gutter and the stars to sing rhapsodic songs in the tangled wreckage of yesterday’s swirling storms Harder still to believe silence isn’t a threat but a holy invocation into an unspoken litany an invitation that melts memory of the mire and night’s indigo shine into a […]
Read MoreDon’t worry child, the flickers aren’t the horror film projection of your nightmares, or the fiery arrows of an intemperate god. The rumbles aren’t the drumbeat of giants warring in the sky, or boulders crashing down the mountain. The sheets of water that beat the window beside your bed aren’t a wind-blown flood, or a […]
Read MoreDon’t worry child, the flickers aren’t the horror film projection of your nightmares, or the fiery arrows of an intemperate god. The rumbles aren’t the drumbeat of giants warring in the sky, or boulders crashing down the mountain. The sheets of water that beat the window beside your bed aren’t a wind-blown flood, or a […]
Read MoreChris is a poet from New Zealand, he styles himself as a ‘rookie poet’ but I think his work is quite good. Chris also has done some excellent exploration of artwork. For writers, good art is an indispensable source of inspiration as we try to capture in words what artists capture in images. Some of […]
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ST. JUDE'S TAVERN 