Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

Gregg Glory [ Gregg G. Brown ] has devoted his life to poetry since happening across a haiku by Moritake, to wit: Leaves / float back up to the branch-- / Ah! butterflies. He runs the micro-publishing house BLAST PRESS, which has published over two dozen authors in the past 25 years. Named in honor of the wild Vorticist venture by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, BLAST PRESS is forward-looking and very opinionated. He still composes poems on his departed father's clipboard, which he's had since High School.

The Singing Well by Gregg G. Brown

-BLAST PRESS-

Sep 022011

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Authored by
Gregg G Brown

“When the Moon Melts”

The dwarf’s hideous face retreated from the basement window, an array of grimy grey whiskers and a radish nose.

“When the moon melts
And the Gods of Autumn roam
Evil and good are equally felt
And nothing certain is known,”

Chanted Mr. Plimsoul and the lady together. Wild shadows flickered around them, and they gestured toward the shut box, black and shiny as a beetle’s back. They seemed to be trying to compel the box to open or spontaneously erupt in flame…or something.

“Casket of Augersaal, I command you: open!” Mr. Plimsoul shouted, making a weird gesture at the box.

“By Neamiahas’ eye, by Qyudditch’s kin, I say: unfasten!” the lady hissed, her boa and her long arms gesturing in the flickering light of the braziers.

The casket hopped on the sawhorses once, as if a person inside were being tickled or kicked, and then was still. A thin jet of purple smoke sizzled from one end of the casket… and then stopped.

Kindle Edition on Amazon ($0.99).

Publication Date:: Sep 02 2011
ISBN/EAN13:: 146627560X / 9781466275607
Page Count:: 200
Binding Type:: US Trade Paper
Trim Size:: 5.5″ x 8.5″
Language:: English
Color:: Black and White
Related Categories:: Fiction / Coming of Age

Catastrophes and Trophies

[Essays], Introductions, The Timid Leaper

Aug 312011

Preface to The Timid Leaper

Catastrophes and Trophies
Report from a Victor and Victim

This collection is actually the combination and slight rearrangement of four separate volumes of verse; almost all of these poems were written in the calendar year 200I. It’s not much to show for a year of human life–that rich mystery we are twisted into by such a resolute hand. The main emphasis of this collection (as I hope will be quite clear) is Nature. Nature and Naturalism are not quite the same thing, however, and I have always had my own disagreements with those who took too dogmatically Thoreau’s painful premise “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” The Timid Leaper sets the keynote of this mixed approach. I hope this collection achieves some grace while trying to attain such goals. It is the beauty of man’s reach exceeding his grasp. The Timid Leaper leaps, not from any discernible goal he might attain, but from some more subtle cause, some interpenetration of events that defies analysis and germinates poesy. The sub-title is “inner nature poems,” and that is to help show that the weather for humans is never merely a matter of what’s over our heads it’s what’s in our hearts as well.

A victim of depression during the composition of these verses, I noticed an inability or unwillingness to assign purpose within myself. I was lax and ready to suffer unmitigated disasters with little more than a shrug and a tear. This is really a rather hopeless state of affairs, as a number of the poems outline. I remained staunchly impressed, however, with Dame Nature’s capacity to excite the recognition of meaning within myself. As meaningless and adrift as I may have been, I could not help but notice that Nature still evoked in me the wry acknowledgement of a more masterful hand in the pictures I kept seeing both before me and within me. “No Wood to Sing Through” shows the adaptability of natural instincts and impulses. It was inspired by my observation of a catbird still thriving without its native habitat, and by my own reflection that I was seeing something meaningful even when my depression had revoked my self as any inherent source of meaning. Something was helping meaning to survive even in the brain of someone who refused the acknowledgement of meaning. Something in me wanted, at least, for meaning to survive or, more exactly, for the expression and acknowledgement of meaning to continue happening, despite my conscious wishes. This is a form of nature’s nurturing weather that is both harsh and humbling. Can’t I be meaningless if I want to? Don’t take that shred of self-definition away from me! But, opposite of Sartre perhaps, it seems that meaning remains contiguous with essence, even when that essence wishes to exile meaning. It is this co-created weather of inner and outer that is charted in this volume of verses.

Full of wily wit and a bastard’s bravado, The Sword Inside was the first burn and purge preparing a place for a new self to take up residence. I had to be rid of old hopes that I had harbored too long. Hopes are the white lilies of the soul, and when their time is past, they fester as fast. There were reconciliations to be made here as well, and rueful acknowledgement followed hard upon the heels of aptly rapid self-wit. Well-rooted weeds and lingering things were burned out, or hacked at with a saber. Some villainy of habit and temperament had to be acknowledged and integrated, a black sheep returned to the fold. Such traceries of whim explored and displayed in The Sword Inside were the iron rungs I used to clamber back from the void.

The section entitled “The Soft Assault” stands apart for its being the documentation of a very severe personal storm and so shows the purely human side of the weather. Nature purists and vegans of nature poetry may safely skip this section if they do not want their nature poetry too irredeemably mixed up with the human roots of that poetry in the poet. This section is the fever chart of one of love’s bitterest victims. The natural phenomenon of the “inner weather” gives these poems their place in this collection. My retreat into nature, and nature’s “soft pursuant touch” of my capacity to keep seeing meaning no matter what, are a direct result of the catastrophes alluded to within these poems.

Indeed, it was nature’s “soft, pursuant touch,” that I could not shake off, and that led me back to myself as more than a recording barometer of outside events. Nature creates great art, but she uses dirty fingers. Soon enough, I was actively pursuing designs and meanings of my own in the material that Nature had fauceted upon me. I was ready to assign parts to clouds and prompt the trees with dialog. When this hubris expressed itself too heavy-handedly, the poems themselves rebelled and those poems have been expelled from this collection as a complete botch. But, as I now think significant, I was saved. And more than saved, I had become a victor from being a victim. Out of my personal catastrophe, I have extracted this volume of verses, which will serve as well as anything for a trophy.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Video – To

[Video]

Aug 282011

Poem – To by gregglory.com from Gregg Brown on Vimeo.

To

 
You, my several, severed,
Gentle selves, limned with wishes--
In the dawnwash of daybreak delivered
(When sleep's gone over to ashes),
I write my soul's shelving shore
On eyelids and tears.

Come, while the saying's braying
And the farmshed's full of wisdom
Lowing to be milked by however praying,
Come walk the dawn's ways, and some
Of your gentle heart's heats share
With mouth and ear.

Together in the forevering grace
Of day brought burning from its source
Let's let simplest and supremest play
Nor ask the sun to go another course
But with hands crossed as lilies lay
Dissolve into love.

Ordinary Things

Sonnets

Aug 282011

There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists our bringing them into view,
Or else in bringing them what light we bring,
As if to ask the question 'Who are you?'

I do not know what answer I would make
Being myself, and, so, invisible--
Although I know when I give or when I take,
Outfitting my days as I best am able.

There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists us, the way a mirror pushes
Until we're left again with things as things,
Alone among our daylit doubts and guesses.

I am one keeps to himself, and although
I do, I do not keep the dark alone.

Wintering by the Atlantic [sonnet version]

Sonnets

Aug 282011

As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each, 
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch           
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.
They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.

In a Manger

Sonnets

Aug 282011

It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,
--And pushed the belly into being mother--
Who, to be herself, had first to the Other,--
Which looked as if it didn't want being born.

Its sideways was more, and worse, than backwards.
It had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb,
Startle the clover and bleat "I am."
The bowie knife came handy without a word.

A tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in,
A clattering shape cauled on scattered straw,
Ungainly upright legs besides the ewe's,
Shook me wet and bellowed out of pain.

What had come too soon would need a mother's milk.
I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk.

The Paper Mill

Sonnets

Aug 282011

I look into the portions of my thought, cold and dull.
Wheel in wheel unsettles the quiet mill asleep
And puts an uneasy harness on all I feel.
The river like a clock runs fast and deep.

Soon there will be paper, deep and white.
Wet slush from the chute, heaps of pulp and dust,
Driven by the living water to be a blank in sight.
A haaing gear gives my cheek a buss.

I pole a belt to the drive shaft, and all begins--
Horses in wheels turn, turn in their dreams;
Floorboards shake with purpose, dark and dim.
The razor nibs of the saw-wheel start a seam.

I weep, weep for sleep and do as I must.
I look into the cold dull portions of my thought.

A Blue Perhaps

Sonnets

Aug 282011

The provident power of hurt and harm
The provenance of an eye ingathers,
(Its certain witness of a moment's charm
That lightly changes a life forever),
Bluely demonstrates in this morning glory
That measures us, our smallness and our fear,
With too blue an eye to ever bear
Until a touch of night shuts its story.
Then we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue,
And wonder in sleep's deep wanderment
If the sun will show us what to do
Or if dreaming can tell us what we meant.
An eye perhaps has followed us all day through,
But we do not know the eye's intent.

Water-Break

Sonnets

Aug 282011

Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,
I stepped into a wooded brook to dip
Ink-worded hands into the snickering quips    
Offered up by the silverquick stream;
I wondered just what the water had meant to mean,
Whose loose stones insist the water into song.

Many times I had lost what footing I had felt,
Suddenly cried out, or laughed in despair,
By hard wet things beneath thrown over,
Raw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt;

And, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked
The sincerer operations of the lark,
Spilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks 
That break bones and never forget.

Rooted Things

Sonnets

Aug 282011

Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,
Representative of my brothers and
Myself, from earth and water grown to good
Plain wood on the township's public land.

Huddled under them by the neighboring pond
Fireworks cracked to color July the Fourth;
We then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud
Stood every year we'd been on earth,

Three stranger brothers our divided folks
Reaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house
Into a home too shy and shamed for such a name.

Now torn away ourselves to spouses
And lives, from rooted things by time unyolked,
I stand between the trees without a name.

Wake

Sonnets

Aug 282011

I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.
The dark appears a darkness self-sustained
By whatever of darkness must remain
Even at whitest noon. But this is not noon.
This is the dark without a shadow, without a moon;
A dark that won't stay shut in rooms;
One that follows even the ripest mood
And rots there, and will not give way to good.
This is the dark wolves build in woods
Who have no hands and whose teeth are sure.
This is the black that cancels the cure;
This the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt.
This lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart.
This it is that makes a faster beating start.

The Ant-Lion

Sonnets

Aug 282011

His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.
On dust more frictionless than ice
A frantic slipping ant will make us wince
To see a crucible mind no more than claw;
A mind that harbors no dark thought to appall
But shapes his perpetual falling wall.
He does not jump for justice or to be just.

Summer's first rain-drop rolls in dust a world
Whose wet invites all wetness hints of growth
(Such a world may we recognize in drought).
Silent and dry, he emerges like a roar
And makes the molten tension burst,
And drowns himself with water, nothing more.
And a something unrepeatable is learned.

Existentialist Dilemma

Sonnets

Aug 282011

The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,' 
And by choosing from Many be left with One. 
Addition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum;

The unwary mistake it for a total solution.
The wise contend that all is confusion, 
Or at best a formal intuition.

To act presumes belief, or so I'm told,
And am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God, 
(And reminded not to mind the length of the odds). 

The less done the better is my subtractive reaction. 
I'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken, 
(Except that, of course, I might be mistaken).

One thought is left me, with which I'd begun:
"The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'"

Good and its Opposite

Sonnets

Aug 282011

There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.
There's a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes
"Good" and it opposite resonate, and even ring
The way a glass cries out when struck--

Sharing its invisible essence like a singer.
Glasses, brim to abyss, display a range
Of interchanging tones to the ringer
Who bangs the magnanimous Strange.

Does a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad?
Either way the song sways, half-empty, half-full.
The opposite of Good's not Bad, but
Odd, whose disobedient music's beautiful.

What words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd,
That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God?

Chain Chain Chain

Sonnets

Aug 282011

Once upon a time, I had slightly
Bruised my fingerend in tying
Unneedful knots too brutally.
The knots were sonnets, gracefully
Losing bout by bout in rhyming,
Despite my careful scratching
That annulled no spot of itching.
I had not thought that writing
Was so much like fighting
Or two witches bitching
So under-epidermally.
I stayed at it relentlessly
Tying tying tying
Every 
Musing, 
Bruising
Blossom stylistically.
The daisy-
Chain was for no one particularly
(Or perhaps I am lying)
You know how things get tangly
When we practice firstly....
The lengthening 
String of words got too stringy
And self-involved in singing
That should have taken flight more singly
By whistling 
Unconcernedly
And not too self-consciously,
The way 
A clumsy 
Kite, so sprightly
Can climb all day 
By dodging
More effortful breezes, never too longly
Lodging,
Never aloft too lingeringly
Until the crisis of a knot too thoughtfully
Unthoughtful cripples the so skyey 
Thingy
Into a crooked tree.

Wintering by the Atlantic

Sonnets

Aug 282011

A midnight ocean and a stippled snow
Greyly perceived from a rail I know
Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer.
What water was above me seemed uncertainer.
What rolled in mist below rolled solider.

As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each, 
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch           
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
I could not tell just what my seeing meant
Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent;
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.

They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.

Evil Interludes by Gregg Glory

-BLAST PRESS-

Aug 272011

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Evil Interludes

Authored by
Gregg G Brown

Novella inspired by the life of the French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire. From the book:

The title of my intensest work, Flowers of Evil, says everything. I am all declared in this paradox. It was gestated with the patience of an elephant’s child, which labors 14 months in the womb before its gigantic birth, the size of a black coup caught in a rain of elemental perfumes. I am positive it is worth all the lies I have told to see it to print; it is also, I may mention, almost worth all the truths I have had to suffer to bring it off in rage and patience. People… their faces go up in flame when they read it. And yet, they deny me everything, all the glory that they were so willing to load down Satan with, they leave me bereft of, although they declare me his disciple. Hypocrites! I am tired, even, of seeing through their terrible, tepid hearts; pale as the starved spit of a saint! Willess imbeciles. The virtue of my trepanned treatise lies exactly in its faults, and these may all be summed up in one singular, monstrous phrase: it is honest!

Kindle Edition on Amazon ($0.99).

Publication Date:: Jul 04 2011
ISBN/EAN13:: 1463686811 / 9781463686819
Page Count:: 136
Binding Type:: US Trade Paper
Trim Size:: 6″ x 9″
Language:: English
Color:: Black and White
Related Categories:: Fiction / Literary

Video – Missing

[Poetry], [Video]

Aug 262011

Poem – Missing by gregglory.com from Gregg Brown on Vimeo.

Missing

  for Marie

She walked with me some while beside the wood,
Knowing only what we neither understood:
The way was dark;  the path confused, but good.

What'd tumbled down to make the walking trouble
Came, at least, from above to have us stumble;
At least, though lost, we were paired and doubled.

All about us moved what we took as gloom,
A dark in darkness beyond the dark of rooms
-Unsure if ourselves or wood had bade it come.

She sang in fallen night, the moon standing by,
Sang of something farther on, past sky
And night, past unanswered owl and me.

Something settled round her then, some shine;
A startlement in branches brought a shadow down;
She was not the world's;  nor was she mine.

Venom and Agony

[Essays], Introductions, The Departed Friend

Aug 212011

Innumerable inchoate feelings all seeking expression and definition contemporaneously are here encoded for the reader. But with myself, and with that art which I most highly value, understanding precedes expression if what is made is to be art at all. In these poems I was caught in a curiously Edenic mode. I was surrounded and imbued with a richness of griefs, and still had not one syllable to name them. I had all the full feeling a human art could cry to posses and none of the sensibility through which to express it. The chaos of my grief had borne its lapidary apple, but I had yet to eat of it and understand. Cynicism is the crassest shortcut between a full heart and an empty mind-empty but well-ordered. It is no coincidence that minimalism is the reigning contribution of the latter half of the 20th century to expression’s vocabulary. It is comprehension without being comprehensive; it comprehends through vital exclusion; it is a supreme form of denial and, as such, never makes a positive, uncynical stand, and can never be ‘proven’ wrong. Invulnerable and vapid, its objects glare in diminished insistence. Ashamedly, I must say that this twerpy type of cynicism makes its debut in lines of what follows here as well. Mostly in the toothless conclusions of the poems there is the oversimplification of a scab, and not the long-thumbed memory of a scar. Perhaps the elision of a decade will help to sort my inner chaos into outer order; perhaps selective forgetting and cowardly crowding-out of old memories with new heartaches will perform the aesthetic grunt-work that poetry demands and that my sensibility exhorts. But oh how my heart cannot wait the decade out! Ruptured, not enraptured, I ululate before my auditors-more full of sighs than songs.

Gregg G. Brown

Nov 2, 2004

The Departed Friend Style Notes

Endnotes, The Departed Friend

Aug 212011

There are lots of questionmarks in these lines, as befits my ignorance. A friend of profoundly poetic tenor pointed out to me the other day that I also enjoy employing negative statements that imply or outline a positive poetic feeling. If I were to have written Hamlet, for instance,

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Might have sounded something like this instead:

Not to be or not not to be, is that the question?

In the poems that follow there is much that is doubted, and many an assertion will not come unattended by its qualifier. After all, what king would step forward into such august company as you yourself provide without his page? Good my page, let us go forth like Wenceslas and provide for our poor and hungry souls the wine and meat of poetry, cibum et vinum . Notwithstanding all the misfires and queries contained in here, I know with severe certainty, as if gripped by a divine hand of lightning, that the feeling is true.

I will not wait for some un-looked-for good to come, but will make my present its own sufficing memory.

Gregg G. Brown

Jan 1, 2005

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