by Ralph La Rosa

Ralph La Rosa, as the title indicates, has created a delightful collection of poetry pastiches and whimsical words-of-play, including playful sonnets, weird lists, clerihews, proverbs and converbs, tailgating couplets, strange rhymes, and auto-epitaphs of famous poets.

Enjoy La Rosa’s celebration and unique spin of the classics, as he pays homage to Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Frost, Plath, Keats, Pound, Williams and more.

I have eaten
the bacon
that was in
the fridge …

Readers will enjoy the poet’s resurrection of famous poems as he uses them as springboards to tackle today’s pop culture and politics. And to wrap it up, he ends with a brief story about Chinese and American writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Annie Dillard, whom La Rosa leads through Disneyland.

About the Author

His youth inspired by a Danforth Leadership Award, Ralph La Rosa later earned a Ford Foundation grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Soviet Union. He earned degrees in English and American Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A teaching career included appointments at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, UCLA, Tbilisi State University in the Soviet Georgian Republic (the first extensive appointment allowed outside of Moscow), and Northwestern University, Evanston. After his assignment to the USSR, he was invited to teach in Budapest and Munich but was unable to accept the offers. In recent years, he taught at several colleges and universities in California.

La Rosa’s publications include critical prose on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in American Literature, Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sewanee Review, Wisconsin Monograph Series, and elsewhere. His work for film includes two scripts on Sam Rodia’s Towers in Watts, California: one sold to KCET Los Angeles and another, Spires to the Sun, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and aired by KCET. For Norman Cousins, La Rosa also coordinated, with Robert Rees, the Chinese/American Writers conferences held at UCLA and Beijing University. Now focusing on poetry, La Rosa has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has published a chapbook, Sonnet Stanzas (Kelsay Books), and full-length Ghost Trees (Kelsay Books).

Sample Pastiche

We’re Not Cool

~After Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”

Seven old men at the
Adios Convalescent Home

We’re not cool. We
Now drool. We

Eat early. We
Act squirrely. We

Stay up late. We
Fight fate. We

Watch porn. We
Are reborn.

The post My Miscellaneous Muse: Poem Pastiches & Whimsical Words appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Gregory Loselle

In The Very Rich Hours, Gregory Loselle recounts experiences, in childhood and later, in and around his grandparents’ house on Grosse Ile, Michigan, an island in the Detroit River near the mouth of Lake Erie.

Loselle’s mastery of various poetic forms parallels the way in which memory is a formal reconstruction of events. Throughout the collection, readers will enjoy triolets and rondeaux, as well as a ballade, sonnet, ghazal, villanelle, sestina and even an Anglo-Saxon caesura, all beautifully executed to bring these cherished stories to life.

Take a walk down memory lane and open the door to a houseful of stories, from watching Grandpa shave to sifting through a crateful of old photographs that “call us to forgotten places” and remind us “what we were and meant to do” in the very rich hours of our lives.

About the Author

Gregory Loselle published his first work, a play, at the age of eighteen, and subsequently won four Hopwood Awards and the Academy of American Poets Prize at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. A recipient of the Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for playwriting, he has won the William van Wert Award from Hidden River Arts and the Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction Competition for his stories, the Robert Frost Award and the Rita Dove Award for poetry.

His chapbooks, Phantom Limb and Our Parents Dancing, were published by Pudding House Press, and The Whole of Him Collected and About the House by Finishing Line Press. A fifth, In Ordinary Time, is forthcoming from The Moonstone Press.  His poetry and short fiction has appeared widely, in print and online.

He teaches secondary Language Arts and Art History in the greater Detroit area, and can be found online at www.gloselle.com.

Advance Praise

With a haunting and contemplative voice, Loselle employs rhythm, word-play, and richness of language line after line. Through rhyme, narrative constructs, and repetition, he crafts poems that are admirably controlled and precise, and reminds us that what William Carlos Williams writes is true: “A poem is a… machine made out of words.” Loselle’s beautifully spun poems continue to reverberate long after the last light’s been switched off.

—Janée J. Baugher, author of The Body’s Physics and Coördinates of Yes

Gregory Loselle’s poems offer memory illuminated by a remarkable astuteness and strong craft. In his hand, the quotidian becomes extraordinary, uncommon, and wonderful. The poet investigates with an unrelenting intelligence and an astonishing clarity.

—James Najarian, author of The Goat Songs

The post The Very Rich Hours appeared first on The Poetry Box.