It
has been nine months since my last post.
However, my new website has been live for about a month and I already
have four significant posts published with another one planned for next week. Next week’s post is, not surprising to those
who know my consuming passions, about a letter that John Keats wrote to his
beloved Fanny Brawne 200 years ago in 1819.
The letter contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful passages ever
written. Perhaps my love for Keats’s
life & writings is allowing a bit of hyperbole, but if you share my
enthusiasm for literature and all things poetic, then you just might like some
of my posts—two Keatsian posts are already up as well as one pertaining to Percy
Bysshe Shelley and nightmares.
I
meant to have this new website up a year ago, but moving to Europe last summer,
then to England & Scotland for the fall & winter, disrupted much of my
writing-related plans such as finishing my long poem from 2017, rewriting my
not-even-close-to-being-finished novel, and reworking several medium-length
poems that I feel somewhat satisfied with.
However, unexpected interruptions of old projects aside, this unexpected
journey did indeed inspire quite a bit of new writing. One such new piece in particular is a poem of
Gothic fantasy written under the influence of despair & madness beneath a
full moon at Whitby Abbey while I wandered alone long past midnight—I will
never forget that night and I can still feel its cold influence. The poem, somewhat medium-length at 15
stanzas and 150 lines, will be published in a small New York press later this
year along with four other poems of mine.
My new website also contains a small handful of
some of my previously published poetry.
Most of it leans rather heavy toward the dark side, but I plan on
posting some lighter work later this year as well—my Tolkienesque poems of fairy-story
especially. So, to those who suffer
profoundly from consuming ecstasies for all things Gothic, for writings ghostly
& supernatural, for whisperings of madness, melancholy, and all beautiful
seductions of Fantasy & Romanticism, then please visit my new website by
clicking the appropriately chosen Böcklin painting below or the link directly beneath it:
Or just click on the link here: https://www.clayfjohnson.com/
Or, to go directly to my Poetry page, please click here: https://www.clayfjohnson.com/poetry
