David B. Lentz's Blog

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.

On this hot morning before the summer solstice I ride the A Train heading downtown.

The daunting and teeming map of the New York City Subway System is posted to confront me and do you know what I perceive with such clarity?

In the colored lines of the routes crisscrossing this map the veins and arteries carry within their conduits the inhabitants who journey as the lifeblood of the City.

Looking down from a divine perspective at the grid of blocks formed by major streets from uptown in Harlem to midtown and downtown in the financial district, and from the East River to the Hudson, a vast mosaic presents itself.

In the grid of the City I discern the squares of an immense chessboard upon which to imagine a grand civilization of animated chess pieces moving in an unwinnable game of chance against a Grand Master.

At the moment disquiet has clenched my spirits in a tight, tin fist.

The pieces of my Life are scattered as the shards of a glorious, porcelain flowerpot, which has been prodded by a persistent gale from the edge of a high
balcony to fall onto the flagstones of a verdant patio.

In seeking to assemble artfully the pile of broken porcelain pixels into some semblance of order and arrange them with telling Beauty and Meaning, only a precious few of the odd shards will make the mosaic of my Life into a mindscape worthy to behold.

Still, I am the Artisan of the mosaic of my own Life slaving under the creative direction of a Master Builder although nothing I do seems to please.

With the innate ache of all good Artisans, whose hands glisten from the clean, wet clay of their trade, I yearn for inspiration.

Finding no better method for my disquiet, I am given to study with my wife the mosaics of Genius crafted by other Artisans in the subway of New York to raise me up so as to walk with sure footing through the inspiration radiating from their brilliant works of Art.

Amid so much chaos underground in the rushing masses of humanity hurtling as passengers in transit within these old Engines of Life through the cavernous, stone tubes carved-out beneath the City, few pause to admire the wholeness, harmony and radiance of the work of the Artisans who created these masterpieces.

Most subway passengers seem to glance at the mosaics unmindfully to confirm where they may be in relation to their destinations or arrivals, which are so rarely endpoints but lead elsewhere above-ground.

I’m at a complete loss as to what to make of Life underground.

Apart from the oppressive burden of transit, the Mosaic Art is the most intriguing aspect of the journey among so many lost souls dwelling here.

I study other passengers in transit mindfully with a keen, quiet eye.

Epiphanies ensue randomly and fitfully. Consider it riding the E Train.

After spending so much Time here, who can help but wonder why all these people live as they do in this underworld of strewn souls?

Have they, too, abandoned their freedom and their free will in brief sojourns to destinations offering them outcomes so often of elusive value?

Wherein resides the Joy and Meaning of Life in riding the A Train?

In this sea of vacant Shades crammed into these tiny, hot, suffocating train cars I am witness to the pain of their journeys painted upon their faces like the make-up of actors performing in a long-running, tragicomic stage play Off-Broadway.

As a source of inspiration I have taken-up reading the "Epiphanies on Grace" by that uplifting, intellectual powerhouse, Reverend Ariel Bueno, PhD, whose awakenings help to quell a burning heart and raise the spirits with his ruminations.

When you consider all the brilliant books that you’ve read over a lifetime, you begin to see a mosaic constructed by the pixels of every book, laid side by side, to shape a picture of the landscape of the intellect in the same way that, when you fly over England in daylight hours, the hedgerows define the enduring Beauty of the English countryside.

In my disquiet I make little sense of this shuddering, round-trip journey.

Who knows what will become of my petty notes from underground?

Just now I feel the pique of invasive advertising posters counselling how to behave in this underworld.

Still, these brazen banners have a purpose: to goad us into commercial action or into social restraint.

Sitting across from me, a young woman about 17, a smallish lady wears a bleak mask of defeat as she holds a boy, maybe six, upon her lap. Is this schoolboy her brother or son? How Life would be so daunting, if the latter, for a child minding a child.

Out of concern for their well-being, they’ll be named in my long prayer list of lost souls haunting the underground as fellow travelers.

Faith is the given name of my ignorance of the universe beyond the powers of intellect otherwise to fathom.

Two antithetical views of Grace intrigue: the first is expressed by St. Augustine who advises that Grace cannot be earned. He reasons that humans cannot place God in a position of debt to humankind simply for behaving like decent human beings according to the Covenant.

Pelagius argues a contradictory position and denies original sin but imagines that good works can't do any harm to one’s divine standing.

Augustine took righteous umbrage to such heresy.

Of this brief leitmotif concerning Grace, would a person’s good works make a difference if you were an omnipotent and omniscient Being?

The worst behaved and most unworthy may well be transformed most by Grace.

What’s the useful purpose of struggling to justify the just?

After honestly observing the conduct of those riding to Wall Street, what does God think about such a randomly abundant money supply?

Can you not tell more about a person by the earnest expression of humility than by the artifice of wealth?

Consider the saints, seers and messengers whose power is derivative of integrity steeped in humility for which masses of humanity adored them.

As the underground sign counsels: “Step Aside and Let Others Go First.”

The first shall be last. And the last shall be first.

Disembarking in Brooklyn at Borough Hall, I pause to gape, as if rapt in an Epiphany, at the lovely, neglected sign, above a well-worn bench, designed with such sturdy precision and Art for its simple purpose long ago. How many weary travelers over decades have sought even a moment’s respite, while waiting underground for the next train, upon this humble wooden bench beneath this mosaic?

The Meaning of homonyms for my destination leaps from this glorious mosaic to incite a riot of heightened awareness and leave me dizzy in the wake of their ironic overtones.

The spoken name of my terminus at Borough Hall mocks me as an underground man burdened to climb too many steep, steel steps to ascend into the blinding daylight above-ground as it assaults my blinking eyes.

Squinting and wary of wanton predators upon arising from the deep burrow like the groundhog of Thoreau’s "Walden," which landed in a stew pot simmering over a wood fired stove in his cabin, I strain to gain my bearings.

Hindered by futile, pecuniary pretexts I live on borrowed Time after morphing into a poor, American relative of Leopold Bloom.

Indeed, my transitory destination at Borough Hall – as I lack any long-term itinerary – beckons and suffers every halting footfall with a scale of indifference, which can only be known in a borough of New York.

Fortunately, we may find solace in the lovely Mosaic Artwork so prolifically omnipresent in the underground.

Grace enabled me to become Mindful of the mosaics as I had traveled past them so many times every day as a passenger in transit on the way to work. Ever since her photography project this summer at Columbia toward her MFA, I linger to admire the Mosaic Art with my wife.

With a true aptitude for Beauty, when Grace invited me to be her photographic lackey, I agreed to lug equipment and keep at bay the odd denizens lurking underground.

Truthfully, I adore her Beatific presence, preferring her company above all others, and sense she had Faith that our collaboration in this creative project might cheer me in my long, intense and deep disquiet.

She proposed a brief book intermingling her photography and my writing into a creative chowder. As a new novel, "Watch List," became mired in a literary purgatory, while I laboriously tapped content into an iPhone app on trains and subway cars, I didn’t see any harm in it.

In her divine and eminently patient wisdom Grace proved to be right, yet again: as our project gained some traction, the therapeutic effects upon my disquiet began to improve my spiritually distressed outlook on Life.

Although only a summer’s creative journey, I warned Grace it was reasonably beyond the realm of possibility that such artistic therapy could become durable in its benefits or even curative in my bleaker case.

Nonetheless, sometimes I become so enraptured and lost within the Beauty of a mosaic underground that I pose a vexing question: when is a tile the mosaic and when is the mosaic a tile?

Rich Meaning must reside somewhere beneath the grim dust of their pale, gentle pixels. Art and Literature and Music as Humanities do connect to a deeper Meaning of Life and we are richer for it.

Muttering the whisper of a Prayer of Thanksgiving for my dear Grace and our family, the words are all but lost in the earsplitting din of Brooklyn.

Although the underground diminishes me, sojourns there must inform some elusive, existential purpose.

Otherwise, Life seems as senseless as a box of rocks.

Lumbering toward the MetroTech Center, I pause rapt in disquiet to reflect upon a sign, posted like a meek mosaic in colossal, block letters in the front window of a Chinese restaurant, which reads:

DIM
SUM

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I grew up in New England near Walden Pond and first read Thoreau's "Walden" at Bates College in the Maine woods. Since then, "Walden" has had a deep, abiding influence upon my life.

Henry David Thoreau is best known as an American writer and transcendentalist who wanted first-hand to experience intuitively and understand profoundly the rapport between man and nature.

In a sense Thoreau is Adam after the Fall living East of Eden as a bachelor in a humble cabin built by his own hands with tools borrowed from his Concord neighbors beside Walden Pond and sustained by the fruits of the bean field sown in his garden and those resources yielded up to him by the wilderness. He wants to transcend inauthentic, everyday life in Concord and awaken his soul to the beauty and harmony of life by living mindfully in every moment in the subtly beckoning arms of the woods, ponds, rivers, seacoast and mountains of New England.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,” Thoreau writes in "Walden" in his "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."

This deliberate action to immerse himself in nature would pulsate with a circular rhythm throughout his brief, vibrant life as he canoed the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, walked the beaches of Cape Cod and traveled in the wilds of Maine with Native American guides.

Thoreau studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. Living in Hollis Hall, he studied rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics and science. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

He and his brother, John, opened a grammar school in 1838 in Concord Academy. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving: John died in Henry's arms.

In Concord he met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who took a paternal interest in Thoreau and introduced him to local writers like Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing and indirectly to his future literary representative, Horace Greeley.

Thoreau worked in his family's pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite.

In April 1844 he and his friend, Edward Hoar, accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres of Walden Woods.

In March 1845 Ellery Channing told a restless Thoreau, "Go out, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."

Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in living simply on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a modest cabin that he constructed on 14 acres of land owned by Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond.

As a protégé of Emerson, Thoreau transforms into a supremely self-reliant individual, which is a core value of transcendentalism.

Transcendentalists hold that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or overcomes, the physical and empirical world around us and that one achieves insight through personal intuition. Nature is the outward manifestation of one’s over-soul by expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts," as Emerson wrote in "Nature" (1836).

At Walden, Thoreau seeks a deep dive into the over-soul like a wood duck on a tranquil pond at dawn and he finds the engine of this crossing-over into a transcendent understanding of life by his immersive communion with nature in all of its pure manifestations.

In solitude Thoreau distances himself from others, not only by a few miles of geography to the purity of the shores of Walden Pond, but also by a worldview intent upon surveying the botany of the Garden undistracted by the common, quotidian pursuits of his Concord neighbors.

As he confronts his most basic need for shelter in the woods, he writes, “Before winter, I built a chimney.” He borrows an axe from a neighbor but returns it sharper than when he borrowed it.

Upon confronting a replica of Thoreau’s cabin of two years at Walden, one is immediately struck by its diminutive size: it is a minimalist but sturdy, wooden, micro-cabin with a brick chimney and one room with a single bed, stove, desk for supper and study, lantern, fireplace and some wooden chairs. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes.

Outside, he built a small, open shed to store wood and keep it dry for cooking, and to keep the sub-zero, New England winter at bay. He sows beans into his garden, picks wild blueberries and raspberries, brews tea of diverse conifers and fishes for the occasional pickerel inhabiting his pond.

His survival as a self-reliant individual depends upon the offerings which nature yields up to him. He is ardently studious about how to live off the land by harvesting only the essentials that he needs. A vegetarian, he once described his extreme craving for red meat and coveted a woodchuck in the neighborhood of his woods.

This great American naturalist could observe a stand of trees and tell by sheer scrutiny the forces of man and nature it had experienced.

He observed the various colors of pickerel in Walden Pond and the ice in winter and listened with disdain to the sound of the Concord & Fitchburg Railroad as it roared and hooted past Walden Pond. As civilization intruded inevitably upon his quietude in his Eden, he speculated what the railroad’s busy passengers were really going to and coming from.

Thoreau considered the townspeople of Concord to be self-indentured slaves chained absurdly of their own free will to their farms, livestock, fields and houses. He considered the price of something to be the amount of irretrievable time that one is willing to trade for it. He said that a man is wealthy in proportion to what he can afford to live without.

He viewed his neighbors as possessed by a certain blindness and even madness in the way in which they slaved from dawn to dusk to acquire and maintain material possessions that they did not really need to sustain themselves.

In "The Maine Woods" he writes of an Indian guide who ventured alone for the pure wilderness of Moosehead Lake and Mt. Katahdin over an entire summer carrying only an axe, a knife, a gun and a blanket: such minimal provisioning deeply impressed Thoreau as indicative of a particularly independent fellow.

Considering the paucity of his possessions at Walden, Thoreau whittled the necessities of life down to the barest essentials. He refused to spend vast tracts of his life at meaningless labor to chase material goods, possessions, luxuries and wealth that he did not want or need and weren’t worth the trade-off in time.

Most people in Concord engrossed in the business of their everyday lives never had Thoreau’s epiphany that the pursuit of material wealth and the search for meaning are entirely separate ventures.

Further, wealth provided no guarantee that one lived well the one brief gift of life, nor whether one lived it either nobly or meaningfully. Thoreau instinctively knew this transcendental truth.

Because he did not pursue a traditional living at Walden, then economy became vital to his lifestyle as a nonconformist. Thoreau was concerned with living frugally by extreme thrift by budgeting his modest means. The payoff for his radical economy was that, unlike his overburdened Concord neighbors, Thoreau was free to spend his valuable time almost entirely as he pleased, opportunistically and unfettered by the everydayness of business.

In the woods Thoreau grew totally immersed in the process of living deeply each day: he watched red and black ants fight an epic battle, which he described as portraying the most profound depths of Homeric valor.

He drifted in solitude in a crude wooden boat on Walden Pond and fell asleep upon its floorboards curious and delighted to learn to which shore the winds have sent his drifting vessel. He sailed in pursuit of a diving loon. He surveyed Walden’s depths.

He communicated with “society” in a chance visit by a humble woodchopper passing by his cabin.

He always finds ample time for reading classical literary works and for documenting what the woods have whispered to his soul in his transcendental journey. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote prolifically in books, articles, essays, journals and poetry totaling more than 20 volumes.

He tended his garden and eagerly foraged in the woods for herbs, teas, roots, barks, berries and fruits to supplement his frugal diet and keep him healthy amid the robust rigors of New England in all seasons.

He marvels at the blossoming of the woods in springtime after the thundering ice goes out from Walden Pond and the woods are enriched by the sounds of migrating geese and wild creatures, which inhabit the environs of his little cabin.

Thoreau maintained keen observations on Concord's natural lore, recording how the fruit ripened over time, when the ice left the pond in spring, many elegant botanical findings and mapping the fluctuating depths of Walden.

Thoreau’s modest life as a naturalist, it turns out, is full and rich, and well lived. He valued most of all his cheerful trade of the pursuit of wealth and material goods for living simply at Walden as it informed his immortal legacy.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and an elegy to John depicting an 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's own publisher.

Thoreau challenged pervasive social views of his time: he was deemed a non-conformist, abolitionist and, some would argue, an anarchist. As a pacifist he failed to see what was gained by the loss of life, treasure, humanity and time to engage in war.

His positions on civil disobedience later influenced the philosophy and politics of influential figures like Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jack Kennedy.

"Civil Disobedience" called for improving rather than abolishing government: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." He was a proponent that a “government is best which governs not at all.”

Thoreau spent one night in jail for refusing to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes used to finance the Mexican-American War and slavery. He was outraged when someone, possibly an aunt, anonymously paid his taxes, a considerable sum at the time, and he was freed from jail against his wishes.

In August 1846 Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Maine to Mount Katahdin, which in an indigenous language means “highest land” -- a journey recorded in "The Maine Woods."

He became a land surveyor and kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees" and "Wild Apples," an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

He traveled to Quebec once, four times to Cape Cod and three times to Maine where these landscapes inspired his "A Yankee in Canada", "Cape Cod" and "The Maine Woods."

In 1859 following a late night outing to calibrate the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years until he became bedridden. Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly "The Maine Woods."

Thoreau's last words were: "Now comes good sailing," followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian." He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime as his contemporaries viewed him simply as a naturalist.

They put less stock in his political essays, including "Civil Disobedience." The only two complete books published in his lifetime were his observations as a naturalist and transcendentalist in "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (1849).

Even "Walden" won few admirers, at first, but downstream his critics recognized its true value as a classic American work of literary genius.

Thoreau is profoundly wise and an earnest reading of "Walden" yields within its pages the power to change one’s perspective for the better through a deeper, new recognition of the wholeness, harmony, simplicity and radiance of life. At least, I was never the same after becoming existentially transformed by my first reading of Walden and have re-read it many times since college.

You may become transcendent, if you read "Walden" mindfully, and may come to understand the true meaning of marching to the tune of a different drummer.

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Born in Woburn, Massachusetts, David B. Lentz graduated from Bates College and has written professionally for more than 35 years. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association, the Center for Fiction in New York and the Royal Society of Literature in London.

Let me begin by thanking novelist, Caroline Gerardo, and writer/web series producer, Susan Kouguell, for enabling me to share and extend the reach of this blog on the writing process to create love songs as expressed in sonnets.

You may visit Caroline's excellent blog at http://carolinegerardo.blogspot.com/

The sonnet’s sound and simple structure requires a sensibility, which is designed for lovers to share, even to embrace both in the writing and reading.

So much so that I would defy any writer or reader of sonnets to deny that they are not at heart either ardent lovers or persons in like daring to imagine themselves as tinder awaiting spontaneous combustion as a lover.

No siren’s song has more power than a love song because no passion on earth can surpass its pure integrity.

Since its invention by a rogue poet, Petrarch, the 14-line rhyming sonnet was meant as a love song. The form of the Petrarchan or Italian Sonnet was devised with an octave (abba,abba) and varying sestet such as (cdcdcd) or (cddcdc).

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in what became known as the Elizabethan Sonnet form (abab,cdcd,efef,gg) ending in a rhyming couplet.

Here is one of my new sonnets using this sonnet form:

I LOVED YOU BEFORE I EVER KNEW YOU
Elizabethan Sonnet
abab, cdcd, efef, gg

I loved you before I ever knew you: I had a premonition of you,
Years before we ever met, I dreamt you would somehow exist,
Even then, I had a revelation I hoped would come fully into view,
Truly, the days were long before you, but how could I not persist?
I knew I’d recognize you by the bright light of your soul, for instance,
The gleam of love within you could betray the words you would express,
Before we spoke, who could have told them fairer from such a distance?
So many thousands of miles we’d trek before we’d know a first caress,
Then moving closer still, what gift of fate drew us then adjacent,
That you could discern with your own ears my love so humbly pled,
And hearing then receive them with a tenderness so renascent?
Who knew that my idea of you, before these words were ever said,
Fulfilled a gift of prophecy that would serve to carry us through?
It’s no less than a wonder how I loved you before you ever knew.
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Edmund Spenser, author of the Faerie Queen, in the time of Queen Elizabeth II created the Spenserian Sonnet (abab,bcbc,cdcd,ee).

Here is an example of one of my Spenserian Sonnets:

IRELAND
Spenserian Sonnet
abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee

What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea,
The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend,
Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who’s angry,
Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend,
Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend,
Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way,
Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers’ intonations mend,
Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay,
Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play,
Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce,
In this verdant, welcoming land, ‘tis the poet who rules the day.
Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice?
Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free,
In genial confines of chic caprice, we’re stirred by synchronicity.
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The Occitan Sonnet (abab,abab,cdcdcd) was first sung by a troubadour named Paolo LaFranchi da Pistolia in 1284.

Here's another example of one of my sonnets in the Occitan Sonnet form:

I HAVE FAITH IN YOU
Occitan Sonnet
abab, abab, cdcdcd

Only one existential vault by my faith is nearly half as grand,
And that would be the bounding, bottomless leap of love,
Needing faith, too, in the will power of a committed stand,
Whether life goes well or ill or halts, beneath heaven above,
We know that life rarely goes as our intentions have planned,
Still, see how faith and love fit, like your sweet hand in a glove,
Surrendering to fate when there’s sense in an exigent command,
Calm in the cloud of unknowing, love trills like a morning dove.
Without faith or love enough, life feigns the pall of a dystrophy,
Good faith is conveyed, when true love knows how much it’s due,
And in our love, our faith is affirmed by virtue of our history,
In every outcome your love justifies that your faith will ensue,
To resolve, by making more magnificent, love’s inherent mystery.
In this dear life in whom is my faith more worthy than in you?
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It's possible like improvisations on a jazz standard to find other variations on the most well known sonnet forms. As writers should make every effort to innovate and add new forms to the language in which they write, here is an example of one of several variations.

PICTURES FROM THE GALLERY OF THE SOUL
Lentzian Sonnet
ababab, cdcdcd, ee

When I close my eyes and picture you, a quaint gallery comes to mind:
Nights of jazz, half-mad with desire, in the sultry, sensual, French Quarter,
Among bluebonnets and white sand beaches in Texas, all the time I find,
You are ever there when I see a gallery of reflections of our daughter,
Skiing powder slopes, strolling rocky coasts, whenever you are kind,
Supping in Quebec, sipping in the Keys, unruffled as a swan in freshwater,
A pale moon catches the curve of your hip as you fall asleep on your side,
How you look at dinner and a show in the City: how you dress to kill,
Enfolding hands with a babyish girl combing for sea glass in low tide,
Your aspect when she plays Gershwin and Grieg in Manhattan, more still,
Your expression when the sense of a splash of wit hits home to reside,
Ah, your beatific face, how my eyes, my heart, my very soul you fulfill.
Portraits, landscapes, still-life, movies, abstract impressions in mixtures:
Ever are you etched, deep in my soul, in a gallery of miraculous pictures.
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What am I working on?

At the moment I am working bringing to light the sonnet in contemporary new forms.

"New England Love Sonnets" is my thesis -- not only that real love can be found by every soul who earnestly seeks it -- but also love is at least one aspect of human experience which makes life fully worth living.

Real love is worthy of every battle that you must fight, tooth and nail, in order to gain it. Love is a sacred, life-affirming quest, which is epic in scope unfolding with mystic riches over a lifetime.

I would be so bold as to posit that, even if you have come close to personal annihilation in the brave venture of seeking love, this process only serves to teach humility to prepare you for love as all love is humble.

Further, I attest to you humbly that I am the living proof of the wisdom of this wild and unlikely thesis.

"New England Love Sonnets" is my best argument for this thesis – love is nothing less than a leap of faith. However, to gain it you must be willing to take this leap relentlessly until you learn what the past grudgingly yields from experience and discover real love.

Once you discover real love, every problem in your life can be overcome, except its loss, whereupon it is incumbent upon you to renew your search -- come what may.

If the sonnet becomes a vessel for love, then my work here is done and yours has just begun.

"New England Love Sonnets" will be published in October and I invite you to share it with someone you love.

Better still, write a sonnet for someone whom you adore. Then write another. And so it goes.

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How does my work differ from others of its genre?

The sonnet is an intriguing poetic form which has not received the literary attention in our time of which it is most worthy.

Its discipline may be considered too restrictive my some poets who prefer to launch into free verse. However, it is the ability to express genuine, deeply felt love in only 14 lines with a distinctive rhyming scheme which make the sonnet so attractive as a literary form.

Where else can an poet become challenged to write deep and moving insights about love in so short a form, except perhaps in the haiku, for brevity of passion and wit?

The sonnet was meant to be passionate and by design must employ simple language which is accessible to its readers.

There is an aspect of the sonnet which also intrigues me as sonnets traditionally provide a "turn" in which the theme may take a focusing direction to bring home the heart of the message in the sonnet often in a surprising or powerful few lines. The art of the sonnet invites the sonneteer to make the turn as late as possible in the 14 lines, usually in the last 1-2 lines -- the later the turn arrives, the better the sonnet may be deemed.

So I try to bring home my sonnets with late turns.

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Why do I write what I do?

I seek to add an enduring voice in my writing with far less regard to what may now be commercially popular or widely read or in vogue, as such timely considerations pass with time.

With a longer view I am in this business for the long haul and am convinced that great writing will sell better over a longer duration and serve as a more durable legacy than commercially driven work.

I write poetry and literary novels because they have legs and write for those who may read me downstream: I write as well for those readers who may read me long after I'm dead.

Humbly, I accept that within the universe I am a speck of dust. But, by God, I may as well live as if I intend to become an immortal speck of dust.

We work with one of the most lyrical, expressive and prolific languages on earth. This may sound absurd but I feel that every serious writer has a debt to pay to the Mother Tongue. Payment of that debt in full entails seeking to leave it a bit better by experimenting in new literary genres and existing forms to give writers who follow new options for even more expressive literary forms.

The literary forms with which we now write have come to us as gifts from the genius of dead poets and novelists.

So it goes that writers should make positive contributions to the living and breathing soul of their native language by expressing their work in its best light, ultimately to leave it better off by having worked in it.

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How does your writing process work?

After a period of reflection I build a road map for the written work to gain a sense of direction. Sometimes, the road map is detailed and precise, and at other times it is purposely more vague to allow for improvisation along the way. The first approach brings tighter first drafts and the second adds passion to the writing.

If I have a tight road map, then I always go back and seek to animate it.

If I venture off in a general direction, then I always go back to apply the necessary discipline to button-up the work.

In either case I use a reiterative process, which may entail a great many re-readings and edits. My novel, "For the Beauty of the Earth," was written rapidly as the words simply poured out of the vessel of my soul: 100,000 words in six weeks. Ultimately, I had to edit 52 versions of this novel until I became reasonably content with it.

"Bloomsday: The Bostoniad" was written over three years of focused work and required half as many drafts to render it as perfect as my imperfect talents would enable me.

I edit my writing until I can add no further value to the words and can't bear to read it another time and abandon it. Writing is never completed, only ultimately abandoned.

No work I have ever written is perfect despite my very best diligence as an editor and I accept this reality humbly.

Fortunately, critics enable us to gain insight into where a writer may have fallen short.

I have the most intelligent readers on earth and prefer to give them credit for their high intelligence and unsurpassed literary taste.

+ + +

Referrals:

Next, I would point you next to the brilliant literary and artistic works of:

1) Gary W. Anderson:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

2) Terry Richard Bazes:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

3) John H. Sibley:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

4) Eric Jay Sonnenshein
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist When John H. Sibley brought his manuscript of "Being and Homelessness" to WordsworthGreenwich Press, it begged of its editor a multitude of questions.

This is a true story of John Sibley's life as a homeless artist living in the streets of Chicago for six months during a winter there. John is a truly gifted artist who has created beautiful, stylized portraits of jazz greats in Chicago.

In a civilized society what responsibility do more affluent persons have to those who are much less so? If money is power in America, as it clearly is, then how would John's voice ever be heard? If John's experience is instructive, then who would listen to this humble voice?

It is the first question which tests the mettle of the great American civilization. To date we have largely utterly and completely failed those who through no fault of their own, except in most cases catastrophic misfortune, have been driven out of their homes and onto the streets in dire poverty.

Don't say this can't happen to you. Any of us at any time can be driven by catastrophe into the streets. If you go into the streets to minister to the homeless and speak to them about their stories about what brought them there, then the sham of every stereotype about homeless persons becomes exposed for the fraud that it is. We are one lost job, one serious illness, one lawsuit, one catastrophic weather event, one IRS audit, one failed business, one death of a spouse from homelessness. If you deny this reality, then you are living a dream world -- a bubble which life will be happy to burst at any time.

One in six Americans will go hungry today. Sorry but this is a national disgrace. We can and should do better. But how?

One FOX News Commentator last week advised the poor to "just stop being poor" as if dire poverty and homelessness were a condition that anyone would ever voluntarily seek and perpetuate. Can you ever imagine living penniless in the streets of Chicago over this past winter?

Republicans have managed to cut school lunches for poor school children. They have cut-off emergency unemployment benefits to those who have been unable to find work in a jobless cycle that has punished the nation for five years. Responding to the political dog whistles of the elite, 40 times they have sought to repeal Obamacare. They counter with tax cuts as if the homeless or hungry American children would somehow be saved by a tax write-off at their income levels.

The income inequality gap reaches epic proportions. How greedy can you get?

The response by House Republicans is that the poor deserve their poverty. They have earned it. They are lazy, ignorant, dirty and unworthy of financial rescue by the very civilization that has brought Congressional members so much wealth. It is true that we are governed in the overwhelming majority of Congressional delegates by multimillionaires.

Time will bring many of these proud, elitist men and women kicking and screaming to humility in 2014.

Are there any members of Congress who believe that they have been sent to Washington, not only to govern the affluent, but also all the people of their districts both rich and poor?

Do any humanitarians reside anywhere in Congress who will pay any regard at all to the suffering of those living in their districts in dire poverty?

I want you to know that at least one humanitarian represents CT in the House. His name is Senator Chris Murphy.

A few months ago I read that Chris spent one of his days-off with a homeless person named Nick at a homeless shelter in New Haven, CT, which has many desperately poor sections among Yale, all the hedge funds and suburban Wall Street wealth resident among Connecticut's "Gold Coast" on Long Island Sound.

To the best of my knowledge no other US Senator in my lifetime has undergone this humble exercise to understand the suffering of one of his constituents.

Here is the story in Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01...

So I sent him a copy of John H. Sibley's book, "Being and Homelessness." A few weeks letter I received a response from Chris.

"'Being and Homelessness' is an extremely eye-opening story and I admire Mr. Sibley's courage in coming forward with its experiences. I can only imagine what it was like for Mr. Sibley and for the countless other homeless individuals suffering in the streets of Connecticut and across our nation. The crushing burden of homelessness is a problem that is too often ignored... It is important for stories like Mr. Sibley's to be told just as it is important for us to continue to raise awareness about the struggle of the homeless... The more real faces we can show of those surviving on the margins, the harder it will be to ignore the growing concern of our poverty and homelessness crisis. I value contributions such as 'Being and Homelessness' for adding another voice to that conversation," Senator Murphy wrote.

You may preview his letter in full on the Facebook Page of WordsworthGreenwich Press at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wordsw...

There is a glimmer of hope that some few people actually do care about the well being of all their constituents.

Why does this matter?

It matters because future generations looking back at America will measure our civilization not only by how the wealthy prospered but also by how we as a nation addressed the suffering of multitudes of our homeless living under our watch in dire poverty.

Thank you for joining us on the Launch Page for "Best of All Possible Worlds" by critically acclaimed literary novelist, Gary Anderson, who revisits Voltaire's masterpiece, "Candide."

You may preview the Book Trailer here: http://youtu.be/p_848noeBhY

Gary speaks about his new novel on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/0AsPJsJ20N4

The Goodreads Profile of "Best of All Possible Worlds" can be found here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...

To read an Excerpt via "Inside the Book" at Amazon, it's here at:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-All-Possib...

You can learn more by visiting Gary's Goodreads Author Page at:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

The News Release is posted on the WordsworthGreenwich Press web site at:
http://www.wordsworthgreenwichpress.c...

Early Reviews are available here:
http://www.wordsworthgreenwichpress.c...

You may visit WordsworthGreenwich Press on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wordswo...

As promised, we extend congratulations to the three winners of proof copies of "Best of All Possible Worlds" are:

Emily Weaver| 104 Cedar Court| | Greenville| SC| 29607| US

David Kelly| 3 Dalton Gardens| Thorley Park| Bishop's Stortford| Hertfordshire| CM23 4DX| GB

David Diller| 9 Highwood Place| PO Box 321| Alpine| NJ| 07620| US

Synopsis:
"Best of All Possible Worlds" continues the saga of Jacques the Anabaptist from "Candide" in the satiric spirit of Voltaire. Anderson's novel begins with the return of Voltaire's hero, Candide, to find his beloved tutor, Pangloss, destitute and abandoned in the streets of Leyden, South Holland.

Set in the mid-eighteenth century, the story then follows the lives of two brothers, Jakob and Robrecht Onderdonk, who lead antithetical lives.

At the heart of the novel is Jakob's quest to abandon his life as a sailor at sea for a more edifying life on land. In contrast, Robrecht is determined fully to embrace a sinful life at sea.

“Best of All Possible Worlds" builds upon Voltaire's masterwork with an air of irreverence and a generous serving of the absurd concerning the universal problem of evil in a world created by a perfect God.

Voltaire mercilessly railed against the philosophy advanced by Leibniz and articulated in Alexander Pope’s "Essay on Man" in which Pope writes, “Everything that is is right.”

In "Best of All Possible Worlds" the writing of Anderson rivals the witty satire of Voltaire: there’s genius in both literary novels.

Both authors tackle a theological problem with which mankind has wrestled for centuries: if God is both good and all-powerful, then why does so much catastrophic evil exist in our world?

Theologians would argue that mankind has been divinely endowed with free will, and the vast majority of the human experience of evil emerges from conflicting self-interest among individuals amid imbalances of power.

However, consideration of the many truly epic catastrophes of human history, like the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, begs the question as to why a perfect God would permit such catastrophe to exist at all. Is this germinal question of faith simply a great mystery of the ages for humanity to seek to answer?

Bio:
Gary Anderson is from the prairies of southern Alberta. He has a master's degree in English from the University of Victoria. After living for a time in Korea, he resides with his wife and two children in New Jersey.

Contact Information for Book Reviewers:
If you are a book reviewer or book blogger and would like to receive a review copy of "Best of All Possible Worlds," please send an email to David Lentz at WordsworthGreenwich Press at wrdzwrth@aol.com.

"Best of All Possible Worlds" is a new novel launching in May by critically acclaimed literary novelist, Gary Anderson, who revisits Voltaire's masterpiece, "Candide."

"Best of All Possible Worlds" is the second literary novel by Anderson whose debut novel, "Animal Magnet," has been voted among the “Best Books of the Decade” and “Best Literary Books of All Time” by Goodreads.


"Best of All Possible Worlds" continues the saga of Jacques the Anabaptist from "Candide" in the satiric spirit of Voltaire. Anderson's novel begins with the return of Voltaire's hero, Candide, to find his beloved tutor, Pangloss, destitute and abandoned in the streets of Leyden, South Holland.

Set in the mid-eighteenth century, the story then follows the lives of two brothers, Jakob and Robrecht Onderdonk, who lead antithetical lives.

At the heart of the novel is Jakob's quest to abandon his life as a sailor at sea for a more edifying life on land. In contrast, Robrecht is determined fully to embrace a sinful life at sea.

“Best of All Possible Worlds" builds upon Voltaire's masterwork with an air of irreverence and a generous serving of the absurd concerning the universal problem of evil in a world created by a perfect God.

You may preview the book trailer for "Best of All Possible Worlds" at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_848n...

Voltaire mercilessly railed against the philosophy advanced by Leibniz and articulated in Alexander Pope’s "Essay on Man" in which Pope writes, “Everything that is is right.”

In "Best of All Possible Worlds" the writing of Anderson rivals the witty satire of Voltaire: there’s genius in both literary novels.

Both authors tackle a theological problem with which mankind has wrestled for centuries: if God is both good and all-powerful, then why does so much catastrophic evil exist in our world?

Theologians would argue that mankind has been divinely endowed with free will, and the vast majority of the human experience of evil emerges from conflicting self-interest among individuals amid imbalances of power.

However, consideration of the many truly epic catastrophes of human history, like the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, begs the question as to why a perfect God would permit such catastrophe to exist at all. Is this germinal question of faith simply a great mystery of the ages for humanity to seek to answer?

Gary speaks about his new book on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/0AsPJsJ20N4

Gary Anderson is from the prairies of southern Alberta. He has a master's degree in English from the University of Victoria. After living for a time in Korea, he resides with his wife and two children in New Jersey.

John Sibley was a homeless artist living in the streets of Chicago for six months when the arctic wind, "The Hawk," blew off Lake Michigan.

His aim in his philosophical essays in "Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist," is to shed light on and humanize a growing, global problem.

"Being and Homelessness" focuses upon the extreme anxiety and pain of being homeless as an artist, which forces him to live underground and exist in an inauthentic mode of being in the world.

Sibley uses an existential lens to focus on this ghastly problem because the homeless being-in-itself is forged in rootlessness, displacement and their lives are governed by the existential D’s of death, dread and despair. After his dark night of the spirit Sibley believes that being homeless in the world, displaced, rootless, is one of the most terrifying challenges that a human being can experience.

"I gazed down into the underbelly of the abyss. I am blessed that I escaped the stygian darkness of the nether world of alleys, bridge viaducts, vacant cars, subways caverns. To escape that region of dread and despair teaches you that pain and suffering are central to the human condition," Sibley writes in "Being and Homelessness."

In these essays Sibley uses the term "being-in-the-world" as an experience that makes one acutely aware of that gap between consciousness and objects in the world. Being-in-the-world makes the homeless aware of a distance, emptiness and gap, which separate them from the region of things. The essays articulate a plea to maximize this great nation’s resources, both public and private, to help the wretched existence of the homeless.

"I cannot recall the exact day-to-day or month-to-month suffering I endured. But the existential feeling of dread, despair, hopelessness, wretchedness and loneliness still clings to my consciousness," Sibley said.

“I write to illuminate the plight of the homeless so that when you see them in libraries, on subways, city busses, local train stations or standing in front of missions -- like they had stepped out of painter Edward Hopper’s canvas -- you won’t judge them, as Anatole Broyard noted, as ‘creatures of the darkness, where sex, drugs, gambling and other crimes are directed against a bourgeois culture that despises them.’”

The terrain for "Being and Homelessness" is Chicago’s Loop, Near West Side and the now abolished Maxwell Street Open-air Market between 1989 and 2005. The homeless problems have become a Malthusian nightmare not just in Chicago but in urban areas across the nation and the world. The large population of homeless men, women and children give most cities a Third-World Urbanscape.

It would be disingenuous to state that the homeless only need shelter when the problem is much deeper than that. The Government needs to invest in creating a new Integrative Holistic Rehab Center (IHRC), which combats the multiple cause of homelessness. Sibley advises that we heed the words of the homeless, Danish genius, Kierkegaard, who believed that philosophy must recognize the presence of man in the world.

"Being and Homelessness" gives a real, human face to the hardships that Americans suffer every day in the midst of unprecedented attacks by politicians unwilling or unable to save a voiceless segment of our humanity where gifted human beings like John Sibley have struggled heroically just to survive the savage class warfare waged against them by those who have sworn under oath to serve all Americans. Voices like John Sibley's need to be broadly expressed and heard within an American society which has lost touch with its founding ideals based in fundamental fairness, equality and humanity.

The reality is that 3.5 million are now homeless in America and multitudes in hard times are only a lost job, a breadwinner's disability or death, a business failure, a lawsuit, a divorce, a long-term illness or natural disaster away from homelessness.

Born in Chicago, John Sibley, is an accomplished artist and author. His sci-fi novel, Bodyslick -- for which he created 52 illustrations -- was published in 2008 by Vibe/Kensington in New York.

Sibley grew up in a Chicago household listening to his father play the boogie-woogie on his Steinway Grand Piano and credits his cousin, Levi, who is now blind, for mentoring him in art.

A 1994 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) Degree, he has worked for 23 years as a supervisor for a hi-tech, acoustic company and has taught in Chicago Public Schools.

He resides in Chicago/Aurora and has two daughters and a son.

He has hired people from the Hesed House Homeless Shelter in Aurora and donated food to the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago.

Sibley is a 2007 American Sports Artist Nominee. His paintings are owned by former Chicago Bull, John Salley; NFL icon, Walter Payton; Mike Tyson; Revey Sorey; author, Manik D. Dover and Chicago Mayor, Richard J. Daley.

Sibley has appeared on WGN-Channel 9 in Chicago with Dan Roan, ABC with Jim Rose, WNUA with jazz icon, Ramsey Lewis and was a courtroom artist for CNN covering the FLN trial.

A great feature story on John and "Being and Homelessness" was published in the "Chicago Sun-Times" on January 5, 2012 at:
http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/9...

"Being and Homelessness" is now available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Homelessn...

Dear Goodreader Friends,

I simply want to invite you to participate in a new giveaway of my "Novel Criticism: How to Critique Novels like a Novelist" which ends soon at:

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

As a writer I seek to help readers of novels to understand better what novelists often consider as they write. The literary success of the writing of a novel depends on the skill of a novelist in essentially 25 critical performance indicators (CPI).

If you aware of these 25 critical performance indicators, then it's easy to write perceptive, critical reviews as you post them on Goodreads. You can essentially rate each CPI and then average them to achieve a fair, comprehensive review narrative with a highly reliable 1-5 star overall rating of any novel.

Your assessment of individual criteria also offers a reliable roadmap to help you to create the narrative of each review that you write.

The net effect is that you will post well considered reviews and helpfully guide your friends at Goodreads to the novels that you admire most.

Well written reviews on Goodreads are certainly valued by all of us as time is so precious: they enable us to gain a broader sense of a novel's appeal before investing in it.

So please join the more than 400 Goodreaders who have already participated in this give-away and list this book on your "To Read" shelf.

Many thanks, once again, to those valued Goodreaders who have participated in prior giveaways.

Just a brief note of thanks to the 424 Goodreaders who participated in requesting the novel, "AmericA, Inc." during the brief 48 hour window during which it was available for request.

Four copies shipped yesterday from Greenwich, CT to the winners:
K Morrow| Henrico| VA| 23294
Erica Attoe| Washington | DC| 20001
Nicki Rowsell| Wesley Chapel| FL| 34639
Kristy Rieger| Chicago| IL| 60612

A new giveaway is coming soon for my new book, "Novel Criticism: How to Critique Novels Like a Novelist." This book was written to help readers of novels write insightful online reviews by understanding better 25 criteria which novelists consider as they write. More soon on this new giveaway.

Thank you, again, Goodreaders: you are inspiring.

If you're a bit too preoccupied to visit Occupy Wall Street, then you're invited to be there in spirit by entering to win a free copy of "AmericA, Inc." -- a novel about the USA after it evolves into a true corporate nation or "corpornation." All is fair game in this comic satire and you may well laugh until you weep at the simple truth of what big corporations seek to make of the 99%.
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...