Visitations
Poems
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Isabelle Blues After the blues bar, Isabelle, The drummer’s beat, The guitar’s riffs, And lips, your lips, So sweet— After the blues bar, Isabelle, The bass’s purr, The harmonica’s wail, A smile, your smile, So pure— After the blues bar, Isabelle, The smoke adrift, The rums, the ryes, And eyes, your eyes, So soft— After the blues bar, Isabelle, And words that wish, So much, too much, A touch, your touch, Such bliss— After the blues bar, Isabelle, We stood alone, There, in the square, In the cool night air, So long— After the blues bar, Isabelle, I sit and long, Ardent and old, For a girl to hold, So young— After the blues bar, Isabelle, The dawn has come, And another day, But I can’t say If life goes on, After the blues bar, Isabelle— No, I can’t say If life goes on, After the blues bar, Isabelle.
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About the Book
In his preface to Visitations, Mr. Whitt writes, “Poetry is the poet. Etymologically, the word means ‘maker,’ but what the poet ultimately makes is not so much the poem as himself. The poet is his own audience—though others eavesdrop—and each poem that he is moved to write speaks to him with a new voice, one that he has never heard before. Thus goes the poet, from poem to poem, from rebirth to rebirth, constantly recreating himself in a perpetual fuite en avant.” The poems in this little book, which were composed over a period of fifteen years, are arranged thematically, not chronologically, and are not meant to trace any discernable evolution, but rather to show the many metamorphoses that the Muse works upon the poet.
About the Author
John Hart Whitt did his undergraduate studies at the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Minnesota (Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude) and his graduate studies at the University of Washington (Master of Arts). He has been teaching literature for nearly thirty years, the last twenty-six at Champlain St. Lawrence College in Quebec City, where he settled in 1974, after spending his earlier years in the United States, Africa, England, France, and Ontario. Though he has studied and taught all the principal literary genres and the works of numerous authors of various nationalities, he is specialized in Shakespeare and poetry, which are respectively his Bible and his way of life.