Van K. Brock: Poetry, Essays, Editing

INDEX.vkb.htm (links)

Poetry Collections
Final Belief 1972. So, say that final belief / Must be
in a fiction. Wallace Stevens
Poets in the South: Vol. I/1
1977 First Featured Poet:
Spelunking 1978
Weighing the Penalties ,1978
Hard Essential Landscape 1979
The Window 1981.
Unspeakable Strangers:
Descents into the Dark Self; 1995.
A Conversation with Martin
Heidegger MUDLARK
(German trans. by Josef Pesch)
Scalding of Eros: New
and Selected (in progress)
......
Prose Collections
(in progress)
Breathing Poetry:
writing poetry
Dangerous Journeys
in prose: on travel, experience, art, writing,
from International
Quarterly, on culture--
Elvis to the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, Venice
and the Crusades, etc.

Other Work
Editor and Publisher
International Quarterly http://mailer.fsu.edu/~vbrock
Anhinga Press http://www.anhinga.org/brock

Spelunking
(and other poems)
Sarasota: New College: New Collage Press. 1978
Published simultatenously as a special issue of
New Collage Magazine.
Contents
Fireflies, (Apalachee Quarterly)
Rouault,(The New Yorker)
The Fans (North American Review)
Spelunking (Southern Writing in the Sixties)
Apalachee (first publication)
The Ceremonies (The Sewanee Review)
Federal Pen (Geoeorgia Review)
Remembering Dresden ( first publication)
The Absurd Snowman (The Back Door)

Rouault

He hangs from a gibbet.
The red sun
wears a black ring.
Man is a wolf to man.

"I believe in suffering.
It is not feigned in me.
This is my only merit.
I was not made to be so terrible."

The society lady fancies she has a
reserved seat in heaven. Who does
not paint himself a face? We are
insane. We think ourselves kings.
Are we not all convicts?

The Chinese invented gunpowder,
they say, and made us a gift
of it. In all things tears.
War which all mothers hate. This
will be the last time, little father.

"I underwent then a moral crisis.
I began to paint with an outrageous lyricism.
It was an inner necessity."

For in turning toward his own inwardness
he may become divided from things.

The red sun always
wears a black ring.

originally in The New Yorker magazine
(also included in The Hard Essential Landscape)

Fireflies

At dusk the flowers in the garden
Dominate the light. Their colors,
The yellows and whites and lavendars,
Set in phosphorescent green,
Disseminate in the fading air.
Decaying wood is not more luminous.

When the air is drugged with light,
An invisible mist of soot,
Almost radiant, settles,
Till a hundred thousand veils"
Descending individually
Slowly close the mesh.

And then the fireflies
Emerging from the flowers
Fly into the night
Like thieves.

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