William Irwin Thompson Web Site

Thompson's work has recently been featured in the new on line international literary magazine Wild River Review. A Diary of Sorts and Streets (poetry) was published by Onteros Press of Santa Fe in 2007. In 2008, two other long poems, Still Travels and Hyperborean Passages were also published in the Wild River Review. These works appeared in book form with Wild River Books (Princeton, NJ) in November of 2009.

http://www.wildriverreview.com/POETRY/On-Reading-the-Penguin-Book-of-Verse/William-Irwin-Thompson

http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/poetry/the_death_of_neda/

(http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=4442).

In RiRa's Irish Pub with Horace's Second Ode

Dactyls and trochees once trampled the Earth,

scrolls of twisted history kept time.

Next came barbarians with torched hands

reading with flames.

Old as I am, now I'm allowed

things occupations scorn or ignore--

Latin studied willingly and Horace

read in pubs.

Portland's Irish pubs serve me well--

cornered away from TV and bar,

tapping inspiration with stout microbrews

tongues will tell.

Humans see movies in twenty four

frames per second, but birds can see

two hundred and forty per second

gestures of time.

Colors they see amazingly in 4D--

dogs can see only two, but we see three.

Dark and light, then colors, but what

do birds see?

Poets see the present as futures' past:

watching the valleys fill, mountains

scab over with cabins, trees flushed out,

flooded by grass.

William Irwin Thompson

Sunset at Point Lobos

(1964)

These cypresses are not

trees of any autumn's season;

they hold

the time

no humans keep.

This is the end of land;

this twisted cypress

points where it turns to sand.

After all the ages of speech,

the air

must taste of our confusion.

Even this present breath

has been taken

from the exhausted air of trees.

Back East

we still can speak

with mechanical confidence,

but here the sea

holds out

salt to our blind tongues.

That's why

the seals on that island bark.

On soiled rocks

where seabirds hover

they yell

as if forgotten by the ark.

Out there

is Asia

now mechanically inclined

to deny the next

tectonic catastrophe of Earth.

Small wonder

the seals bark,

for who could speak

with miniatures of history

ending in their wide, God-damaged eyes.

from Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart, Collected Poems 1959-1996.

(Lindisfarne Books: Great Barrington, MA, 1997). (http://www.lindisfarne.org/products.html?cat=21 )

Bio

C.V.

Books

Poetry

Essays

Interviews

Lindisfarne

History

Lindisfarne Fellows

The Lindisfarne Chapel

William Irwin Thompson World Wide Website