Poetry Rules

I am very grateful to editor Kathryn Rantala for including this poem in the latest chapter of The Anemone Sidecar . It deals with madness, a theme which has become always more manifest in some of my latest works. Women’s Only Asylum (starring Miss Plath, Miss Frame and Miss Dickinson) A mansion that is more like a condo, inhabited by the kindred souls of those who have lost their sanity. You will find them all gathered here in participating disruption wearing their candid straitjackets, playing cards with their mouths, acting scenes like Tomfools. There is the crazy stare of Sylvia writing wailing lines, on sheets tossed around her body. The new so-called schizophrenia in the lucid ravings of Janet. So many different forms of lunacy, but you will end up loving them all. Even Emily in her room, blowing glass panels to smithereens at last. http://www.ravennapress.com/anemonesidecar/pdf/chapter_16.pdf

"Love in the Asylum"--my favorite poem by Dylan Thomas--is possibly the most lucid and poetic account of the unbearable madness of poetry creation. I cannot help thinking that the "girl mad as birds" that "raves at her will/on the madhouse boards" and in whose arms the poet suffers "the first vision that set fire to the stars" is a marvelous metaphor for his Muse and the fury of writing. I am deeply touched by this kind of madness. I too crave for a spark of that insanity in my poems.