Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was worn in Edinburgh, Scotland, and suffered from frail health all through childhood, an affliction that would follow him into adulthood and manifest itself ultimately as tuberculosis. He initially set out to be a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1875, though he never practiced. He is best known for his tales Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though he wrote a number of other stories, excellent essays, and of course poems. Constantly searching for a climate that would ease his suffering, he died quite young at the age of 44 and was buried high on Mt. Vaea in his final home of Samoa, the site of which is immortalized in the poem “Requiem” contained within these pages. I was first introduced to his timeless A Child’s Garden of Verses by my mother as a child myself, and the simple, extremely perceptive moments beautifully rendered in Stevenson’s effortless cadences and perfect rhymes went a long way, I imagine, to making me believe from an early age that poetry was the best way to explain and discover everything, and subsequently made me want to be a poet mys...

The Land of Nod From breakfast on through all the day At home among my friends I stay, But every night I go abroad Afar into the land of Nod.   All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do— All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams.   The strangest things are there for me, Both things to eat and things to see, And many frightening sights abroad Till morning in the land of Nod.   Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear....

“Introduction A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES To Alison Cunningham Bed in Summer A Thought At the Seaside Young Night Thought Whole Duty of Children Rain Pirate Story Foreign Lands Windy Nights Travel Singing Looking Forward A Good Play Where Go the Boats? Auntie’s Skirts The Land of Counterpane The Land of Nod My Shadow System A Good Boy Escape at Bedtime Marching Song The Cow Happy Thought The Wind Keepsake Mill Good and Bad Children Foreign Children The Sun’s Travels The Lamplighter My Bed Is a Boat The Moon The Swing Time to Rise Looking-Glass River Fairy Bread From a Railway Carriage Winter-Time The Hayloft Farewell to the Farm Northwest Passage I. Good Night II. Shadow March III. In Port The Child Alone 1. The Unseen Playmate 2. My Ship and I 3. My Kingdom 4. Picture-Books in Winter 5. My Treasures 6. Block City 7. The Land of Story-Books 8. Armies in the Fire 9. The Little Land Garden Days 1. Night and Day 2. Nest Eggs 3. The Flowers 4. Summer Sun 5. The Dumb Soldier 6. Autumn Fires 7. The Gardener 8. Historical Associations Envoys 1. To Willie and Henrietta 2. To...

The whole paradoxist distich should be as a geometric unitary parabola, hyperbola, ellipse at the borders between art, philosophy, rebus, and mathematics – which exist in complementariness. The School of Paradoxist Literature, which evolved around 1980s, continues through these bi-verses closed in a new lyric exact formula, but with an opening to essence. For this kind of procedural poems one can elaborate mathematical algorithms and implement them in a computer: but, it is preferable a machine with … soul!...

I M M O D E S T With the shame Shamelessness U N D E C I D E D Fighting Himself J A Z Z ( I ) Melodious Anarchy J A Z Z ( I I ) Anarchic Melody...

Fore/word and Back/word _________ 3 The making of the distich : _____ 3 Characteristics: ______________ 3 Historical considerations: _____ 5 Types of Paradoxist distiches ___ 8 1. Clichés paraphrased: ___ 8 2. Parodies: _____________ 8 3. Reversed formulae: ____ 8 4. Double negation _______ 8 5. Double affirmation, ____ 8 6. Turn around on false tracks: _________________ 8 7. Hyperboles (exaggerated): __________________ 8 8. With nuance changeable from the title: ________ 8 9. Epigrammatic: ________ 8 10. Pseudo-paradoxes: ___ 8 11. Tautologies: ________ 9 12. Redundant: _________ 9 13. Based on pleonasms: _ 9 14. or on anti-pleonasms: 9 15. Substitution of the attribute in collocations ___ 9 16. Substitution of the complement in collocations 9 17. Permutation of various parts of the whole: ___ 9 18. The negation of the clichés ______________ 10 19. Antonymization (substantively, adjectively, etc.) ________________ 10 20. Fable against the grain: _________________ 10 21. Change in grammatical category (preserving substitutions’ homonymy): ________________ 10 22. Epistolary or colloquia style: _________...