February 8, 2003
There are so many poets, so many poems.
They pour in from the Atlantic, through Chesapeake Bay,
up the James River to my home.
So they did up the Housatonic to the Williams River
and me in the Berkshire Hills.
When I lived in California,
there were poets and poems everywhere,
swept into Santa Barbara Bay, flooding the mesas.
There are poets and poems everywhere:
in the foothills of the Rockies, across the Great Plains,
on top of the Adirondacks. The Catskills hide them,
and the Hudson flushes them out,
they are everywhere praising our Earth home,
bringing words and joy to everyone!
We sing your praises, oh my planet,
great Milky Way, Cosmos among us.
For those who remember and for those who now wish to know, Alan Brilliant with Teo Savory was one of the brains-behind-ma crafting some of the most exquisite and ground-breaking poetry publishing from the 60s onward in the United States. Unicorn Press. The locations were the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Santa Barbara (bookstore and press) and North Carolina, and at this point about anywhere a good press man and poet like Alan wishes to hang his hat. His book design is legendary, his translations and work with translators historical, and his generosity to the life of poetry, which it is, swollen to the heights of any hall of fame.
