Hello, my name is
Paul Stoskus.
The first poems (e.g., Blind Beggar Girl, De Sade at Picpus) I wrote were as an undergraduate and I've written intermittently across my adult life. But most of the poems here were written since my retirement in the period from 2015 to 2024.
With the exception of the haiku, all the poems here are free verse. The 100 Poems, all written between December 15th 2021 and January 19th 2022, were inspired by the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, a compilation of classical Japanese poems. Like those poems, mine are five lines each. But, unlike them, they are not waka, a genre that uses an alternating pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.
I grew up in Rhode Island, the Ocean State, and spent much of my adult life in Washington, D.C. I've traveled to about thirty countries and lived for eighteen months in Thailand. Reading has always been a favorite way to both pass time and also learn about things I might never otherwise stumble upon. But I've always admired risk takers and have managed to make my own adventures, especially when younger. So it seems fitting that in one time and place I was called "the brain" and in a different time and place "mad dog."
To first lovesJohn Stoskus | Birute Stoskus, nee Savickis
To PoetsSylvia Plath | Mary Olds | Charles Simic | William Butler Yeats | Dante Alighieri | Walt Whitman | Billy Collins | William Carlos Williams | Wallace Stevens | Stephen Dobyns | Ezra Pound | Anne Sexton
To InfluencesAkira Kurosawa | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Vincent Van Gogh | Caravaggio | Friedrich Nietzsche | William Shakespeare | Wong Kar-Wai | Paul Gauguin | Vladimir Nabokov | David Hume | Anton Chekhov | Werner Herzog | Aristotle | Francis Ford Coppola | Michelangelo | Edith Hamilton | Vincent Scully | Eric Rohmer