Unexpressed emotions never die
It seems that they attain eternal life!
We give a  wanton wince, a wistful sigh

But might such hidden feelings lie?
As does a husband to a questioning wife.
Unexpressed emotions never die.

Muse on emotions hiding, wonder why.
Will they cause an everlasting strife?
We give a  quantum wince, transcendent sigh

As we grow older, feelings multiply
And fearing laughter, in  the back they’re knifed
Unexpressed emotions cannot die

And gazing ever closer, magnified
We divide each one into  unequalled halves
We give unnoticed winces to blind eyes

So what is left, what will of us survive?
All the feeling unexpressed in life!
Unexpressed emotions never die
Take care of what may be your endless lies.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68877/just-get-the-poems-out-there

“The first poetry blogger I ever read till my eyes swam was Ron Silliman. I knew him rather vaguely as the critic behind The New Sentence and the editor of the major anthology In the American Tree,despite his having published nearly 30 books of poems. By the time I found his blogspot in 2003, Silliman had been posting for almost a year. Picture me instantly hooked, not so much by Silliman himself as by the concept: a poet writing about poetry, in a personal, erudite but not necessarily scholarly manner, on pretty much a daily basis. I went back and read the year’s worth of archives, including his debut post from August 29, 2002 (which strikes me as funny now, given how popular his blog has become):

Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven’t seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn’t about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking.

Perhaps Silliman was one of the earliest adopters thanks to his familiarity with the computer industry, where he happens to work as a market analyst. He wasn’t the only one inspired by the possibilities of the rapidly evolving medium. The same month I bookmarked his eponymous URL, Silliman posted his first blogroll—a list of several dozen other poetry-focused bloggers. I’d never heard of most of them, even the handful who lived in Brooklyn, practically in my backyard. I clicked them all.

Totally thrilling. Within the month I was thinking, damn it. Could I have skipped my MFA program (which I’d delayed for years after my BA, unsure and wary) if the blogs had arrived sooner? (I was already working as a writer and had no plans to teach.) On these emerging blogs, as well as on e-mail lists and forums, I’d finally found what I’d been looking for working in publishing, hanging around at readings, and going to grad school: other poets. Not famous ones, elder ones, teaching ones, laureate ones, or the ones with books from Knopf stocked at Barnes & Noble. The other ones. Ones like me.

***

Whatever subset of POET you’re looking for, the Internet’s got them. Like the mimeograph and the photocopier in their day, blogging software and hosting services allow anybody to hang out a shingle and start publishing—without buying apps or renting server space, without registering a domain, and without knowing how to code a single tag. The key word there is anybody. Academic credentials are optional, no pitching articles to editors, no need to have three books out and another on the way. Fast, cheap-to-free, low tech-threshold publishing quickly has become as simple and ubiquitous as e-mail, and much more effective, in practical terms, than a letter to the editor when it comes to telling William Logan what you think of his latest review.

Which is to say, along with changing the speed and focus of aesthetic debates, blogs have also changed the participants. Reb Livingston,publisher of No Tell Books and the online journal No Tell Motel, agrees. She’s pleased to see outsiders infiltrate:

Poets who were never in the center (often these were women, but not limited to women), who weren’t getting attention, are now getting attention and readers—often more than the so-called mainstreamers. The old way of getting an MFA, winning a contest, publishing with university presses, and getting a job teaching has been shown not to be a particularly good measure of anything—if anything, the many flaws and shortcomings [of that older route] have been exposed.

Poets have hacked the template—both literally, as they edited the HTML behind their blogs, and figuratively, creating alternatives to once-dominant modes and traditional publishing platforms. Frustrated that the established systems weren’t as user-friendly as they’d like, they’ve approached poetry publishing and poetic discourse in the manner of open-source programmers, improvising workarounds and frankensteining new hybrids. “

Amber eyes and hair of Scottish queen
Skin  of cream and lips for whistling tunes
She  made her  silent presence   felt and seen

Her artist’s eye was studying the scene,
Imagined and embroidered like a moon.
Amber eyes and hair of red flew free.

I can see her smiling and serene
As I wandered in from winter gloom
She  made her  silent presence   felt and seen

In her eyes, I never saw disdain
Only love which waited for its home.
Amber eyes and hair so  bright it flamed

Now we age, what part of us remains?
The eyes  still have  perception wide that blooms
She  makes her  presence   felt  but does not scream

Over us, the end of life may loom
Do not quit creation all too soon
Amber eyes and hair of Stuart queen
She  made her presence  fill the afternoon

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/prayer-my-daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.  There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deep-sworn-vow

A Deep-Sworn Vow