MySpace Folks

    I'd like to thank the many MySpace Bloggers who have stopped in at our blog and looked at what we do.  I'm still new at this and still getting to know this resource.

Poetic Matrtix Press new volume due out soon!


From the Preface:
"The Unequicality of a Rose by Joel Netsky is a story.  All good poetry tells a story; some poems are stories told in grand poetic language like the great epics of our shared cultural history; some poems are individual pieces set together to create a story.  The Unequicality of a Rose is a story told both in individual verse strung together and as a long tale told with a unique poetic language."

If you like poetry that pushs the envelope of what poetry today should be you'll like this daring work. Joel takes a classical approach to language and then does something that extends the language out where we haven't seen it before.  He makes large demands on us both in the language and in the philosophical approach he takes to important poetic questions. Go to htttp://www.poeticmatix.com for more information.

Philosophy is a Discourse


Philosophy is a discourse traversing the continuum:
one speaks,
millenia later another comments,
millenia after that redux.

It is of a quietude, a blissful quietude,
a tree into which birds snuggle,
an untroubled glade.

That pristine thought,
that questing mind:
two voices in harmony,
their lips embrace.

Elixir are those springs,
that melody of wing and earth,
that bottomless quarry of concord,
which will last as long as eternity,
as long as the mind.
               

by John Peterson

Just a note on President Bush's recent "change of policy speech" on Iraq.  As one who has taken a position in opposition to Bush on his Iraq War still, in order to maintain my own integrity, I take it upon myself to reach into my own objectivity, lifting the filters I have created as a result of previous information, to peer into the current thinking of our leaders.  I did this in the case of this speech to see if GW has taken to heart the overwhleming discontent of the American people on the condition of the Iraq involvement shown in poll after poll and in the result of the last election. 

I listened rather carefully to the speech and noted that indeed there was nothing significant in terms of a policy change and in terms of recognizing the discontent of the country.  I must admit that I was not surprised by that.  What did intrigue me was really something else.  If I had come into the speech with only a short term view of the Iraq situation I might recognize a very consistent view presented by the President about the current condition of the War and the nature of the changes that Bush was presenting.  Indeed he came right up to admitting that past military actions have not been successful.  That errors were made in the size of the original deployment.  That past attempts to get a handle on the insurgency were faulty.

He then made the case (again) for not leaving the conflict until the "job was completed;" until the "new" Iraqi goverment could defend itself; that we owed it to the Iraqi people to finish the job and to stay until "we" could get their lives back into some kind of reasonable condition of security.  All of this could, on its face, seem sensible.  The conflict once started was ours to finish.  We had made a commitiment to the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam Hussien, this done we must complete the job. 

Well, this seems like the honorable thing to do except there is this little problem.  The problem is kind of like breaking into someone's house and busting up the furniture and then saying you are only there to repair the furniture.  You have terrorized the family but it is your duty to stay and fix the furniture.   If it were possible to completely forget that Bush attacked Iraq through a series of egregious lies and deceptions; if it were possible to forget that it was these lies and deceptions that provoked the current carnage; if it were possible to obiterate the fact that it was Bush and his people that caused all of the death, destruction and current internicene violence that is now going on in Iraq, then this elaborate reframing of the War effort might have some credibility. 

But, of course, attempting to erase the truths that lead to Bush attacking Iraq are not lost on the American people, the news media, congress - including many of Bush's own Republican allies. The double speak of the Bush era has run its course.  The very people that Bush has counted on not to see the duplicity in fact have the intelligence, they see the duplicity.   It is not his "new policy" that is his last ditch Iraq effort, his speech infact was this last ditch effort - and it has failed.