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.

A Miscellany

by Michael Estabrook

A delightful miscellany of poems on a multitude of subjects in various forms and genres including: ancestral portraits, bestiary, commonplace, complaints, catalogs, concrete, dialog, dreams, ekphrastic, erotica, experimental, found poems, free verse, light poems, imagistic, list poems, lyrical, military, monolog, narrative, nostalgia, object poems, odes, pentastichs, persona poems, philias, phobias, philosophies, portraits, prose poems, romantic, satire, sonnets, stream-of-consciousness, triptychs, work . . .

“The Poet’s Curse”

Everything the poet sees
or hears, thinks, feels or imagines
gets captured, interpreted and shoe-horned
into a damn poem
whether they like it or not.

About the Author

Educated first in the sciences, graduating into comparative literature and languages, Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer child-of-the-sixties poet freed finally after working 40 years for “The Man” and sometimes “The Woman.” No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy stale windowless rooms.

Instead, he is able to concentrate on making better poems and on pursuing other interests including: art, music, theatre, opera, history, genealogy, philosophy, and his wife, who has always been the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

Since the late 1980s, Michael has published over 20 collections, including most recently: Bouncy House, edited by Larry Fagin (Green Zone Editions, 2014); Two Sides of the Same Coin, drawings by Wayne Hogan (little books press, 2016); It Is What It Is, with Phil Weidman, drawings by Wayne Hogan (little books press, 2018).

Hopefully with each passing decade the poems have become more universal in nature: clear and concise, succinct and precise, more thought-provoking and relatable.

What They’re Saying…

Michael Estabrook’s The Poet’s Curse is a must-read collection by a particularly perceptive observer of our often-cockeyed world. Each of his poems repeats and enlarges upon the flavor of his brief jewel “because of the encumbrance of material things”: rusting stove at curbside being/thrown away by the inhabitants/of an old dilapidated shack/in back and I think that all/of us should remember/to throw-out our old stoves. Read Estabrook’s The Poet’s Curse knowing you’re reading real poetry.

~ Wayne Hogan, Poet &Artist

What’s become increasingly clear to anyone paying careful attention over these past few decades is that Estabrook is a master jeweler and that each day, each moment, of his life is a small, glittering stone waiting to be shaped into something iridescent and precious. These poems are the minutiae of a life well lived and well loved – each one is a gem that shines with a vital, stunning clarity.

~ John Sweet, Poet

I have been reading Michael Estabrook for the full twenty years that I’ve been engaged with the small press, and never tire of his humorous, often self-deprecating, yet poignant poetry. This full-length book is long overdue, and is a just reward for a consistently wonderful poet.

~ Glenn Cooper, Poet & Collagist

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