Broken Music Selected Poems, Revised Edition

I can say little about the range of poems shown in Broken Dreams. Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Some of them are better than others and vice versa. Unlike a novel, poetry can only be described by citing examples. The range of levels may be seen by looking at "The Body Speaks," and "Old Guys Seldom Wear Purple".

[Frank] Kit Stokes grew up in central Illinois, received a Ph. D from the Univ. of Illinois, and retired as a professor emeritus in 1973. Early drafts for these poems date from 1985 to 2010.. The idea of progress in the arts being at best nebulous, the concept of "modern" poetry has always seemed rather arbitrary to me. I prefer traces of representation in painting, melody in music and subject in poetry. The academic flavor of my poems is honestly earned. Some have maintained that prose demands words in their best order while poetry requires the best words in their best order. In their relation to head and heart--Reason and Emotion--my poetry seems at times head-centered and prosaic. In Bertrand Russell's figure emotion is the wind in the sail and reason the hand on the tiller. Poetry is driven by the heart and steered by the tiller. I will plead guilty to having sometimes faulted inspiration by steering too heavy-handedly, and to possessing a fact-centered rag-bag mind. Broken Music shows the influence of the 1950's on my use of forms in this potpourri of anecdotes, memoir, narrative, nonsense and ambiguities. I have seldom met a poet whose every effort was memorable (though Dickinson, Housman and Kooser come close). My models range from Frost to Whitcomb Riley, with sallies into newspaper verse. Though my aims are humble, broken music is still, to me, music.