http://www.salon.com/2016/10/31/walt-whitman-saw-donald-trump-coming-genuine-belief-seems-to-have-left-us-the-underlying-principles-of-the-states-are-not-honestly-believed-in/

Quote:“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil,” Whitman wrote in “Democratic Vistas, “until it found and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past.” Democratic politics demand democratic culture, and without the committed cultivation of that culture, a question will forever haunt the new nation: “The people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote — and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?”

Homogeneity is impossible in a country as diverse as America. It now seems that there are elements of American culture lacking the main things — curiosity, avidity, hospitality — while there are other elements failing and failing better as people dedicate their time, thought and labor to building a country of Whitman’s imagination; the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King’s dreams. If that project fails, as Whitman warned, “if America is eligible to downfall and ruin,” it is “eligible within herself, not without.”

Belle Lettre on the Postmodern

“Universals of the mind and the senses make poetic movements and schools possible. Universal sensibilities provide generations with solidarity around the voice of particular poets. It is the privileging of a poet’s voice that gives rise to his or her subjectivity. This subjectivity has enabled the evolution of Twentieth century free verse of the postmodern period. The magnitude of the free verse movement is a result of the order surrounding the poet’s voice. Postmodern poetry evolved into the dominant literary mode of the last half of the Twentieth century;and subsequently reflected the poet’s concern for cultural ontology. The poet’s voice in the second half of twentieth-century  American poetry depicted the abundant populace of American identities (i.e., African-American, Asian-American, Chicano, Latin@, LGBTIQ); its distinctive subjective trait now saturates the poetic experience. The subjective is now the dominant discourse, and it has become a postmodern paradox.”

I have walked the silent paths of grief
Sunless,dreary,cold and all alone.
I have slept on beds of winter leaves.

I feel that death’s an avaricious  thief.
Although my heart weeps and my joy has gone,
I have never felt I was deceived.

I have learned that human life is brief.
I have learned by sorrow we’re undone.
I  have sifted earth and what’s beneath.

I felt my dark emotions  seethe
While I have been mocked by glaring sun.
I have learned the geography of grief.

I wait in patience for my life to cease.

When will my last message deign to come

Will my life be written on a leaf?

Unconsoled  grief  can make   us dumb
Into  our  hearts, we drag the ice  that numbs
I have walked the silent paths of grief
I have made my bed on winter leaves.

They say that writing bad
Poetry can be good for you
It seems it’s practicing that matters
Up to a point
Which makes me recall
Using cliches is an error
When do  you move
From practicing to reality?
It’s like life itself
We think we are practicing
And before we realize
It’s almost over.
This is it.
Life
Reflections
It’s being present that counts

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-worst-poems-by-7-great-writers/

William Wordsworth

And to the left, three yards beyond,

You see a little muddy pond

Of water–never dry

I measured it from side to side:

‘Twas four feet long, and three feet wide.