Tag: Phillip Ellis

Some Online Byways

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Phillip Ellis I have, since my late teens, held a so soft spot for the 1890s in my reading heart. Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Machen, Brennan and others, all have a place in that heart, and I want to use one of them, Arthur Machen, to illustrate some places online for those who love books and reading. The first place that I want to stop by is among the most obvious: the Friends of Arthur Machen website. The internet is a great resource for hunting up literary societies, especially those dedicated to particular authors. In this case, the Friends is…

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H.P. Lovecraft’s Slim Purpose

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Phillip Ellis  Winfield Townley Scott once made the following remark about H. P. Lovecraft’s verse: “To scare is a slim purpose in poetry.” This is true; there is more to weird verse, poetry of fantasy and horror, than shudder-mongering, and there is more to the genre of horror than refining the evocation of physical disgust and revulsion. Part of the problem is that so much of the Lovecraft’s weird verse feels stylistically deriviative of both Swinburne and Poe. It is only relatively rarely that Lovecraft achieves his own style, his own voice technically. One key example of this latter point is…

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Autumn

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Phillip Ellis I won’t say that this thought has always struck me as evident, or even possible, but, for a long while, it seems to me that Brennan’s focus on the European seasons in his XXI Poems: Towards the Source and his Poems reflects a focus so intense on the absent beloved that all his terms of reference are to her and her world. This is a complicated way of saying that the lover is thinking solely of the beloved. She is his world, his point of departure, his Eden, and his point of return. Which makes the following all the more…

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Form and Content

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Phillip Ellis Part of my poetic practice involves mastering as many poetic forms as I can. By being able to write as many as possible, without explicitly needing to concentrate on their demands, I find that my ability to write effective poetry is enhanced: I need not lose energy concentrating on the rules of a form, and can concentrate, instead, on the poem’s content. Part of this process involves the creation of new poetic forms, usually out of pre-existing elements. A case in point is one that I use for a series of pieces, each titled “Image”. The basis of…

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New Monthly Blogger – Phillip Ellis

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Southerly’s Monthly Blogger program has got off to a brilliant start, thanks to the thoughtful, engaging and inspiring posts from Tracy Ryan. Thank you, Tracy! Next in our program is Phillip Ellis. Here’s his bio: Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press. Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his…

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