....I relish participating in the great historic conversations about the mystery and wonder of being. My own experience is at the base of it, but in striving to understand my own urges and observations, I am also speaking for others who walk this glorious earth. I have no way of understanding others except in terms of my own being, and I am invested in the hope that my being can be representative, universal. I am in fact a universal being, as every atom is a universal – alike yet different from others. I write poems to try to express what I have come to know and to reach across the divide to others engaged in the same struggle for meaning and purpose.
I feel poetry is a way of sustaining the intensity of otherwise random and ephemeral realizations that have come to me and to countless others in the separate and connected living of our individual lives. I have taken upon myself the struggle to express what all too soon would fade away for us all were it not given a tangible reality of its own. The Gilgamesh poet long ago did this on stone tablets with the same end in mind, bringing timeless universality to the particulars of his story. Technological advances may inexorably alter the processes and materials of composition, even sending words into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. But the urge to express what often presents itself to human awareness as fleeting and ineffable continues to stimulate my calling to create a memorial to what is lasting and universal in human life.
I feel poetry is a way of sustaining the intensity of otherwise random and ephemeral realizations that have come to me and to countless others in the separate and connected living of our individual lives. I have taken upon myself the struggle to express what all too soon would fade away for us all were it not given a tangible reality of its own. The Gilgamesh poet long ago did this on stone tablets with the same end in mind, bringing timeless universality to the particulars of his story. Technological advances may inexorably alter the processes and materials of composition, even sending words into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. But the urge to express what often presents itself to human awareness as fleeting and ineffable continues to stimulate my calling to create a memorial to what is lasting and universal in human life.
POET, AUTHOR, COLLABORATOR
Robert M. Giannetti
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Robert M. Giannetti, former owner of Bob’s Olde Books in Lewiston, New York, received his B.A. from Niagara University and a Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature from Duquesne University. After Army service, several teaching assignments, a stint on a garbage truck, foundation work, and business ventures around the country he returned to Western New York in 2006 to focus on writing, bookselling, and collaborative work with artists and musicians. He has appeared in concert with the Harmonia Chamber Singers and as part of the duo, Voice and Viola, he founded with classical violist, Leslie Bahler. Publications include two books of poetry, Drawn by the Creek and Winter Vision, the latter of which was translated and published in Poland in a bilingual edition which was named Best Book of Poetry at an international literary festival in 2011. The University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection also published a limited edition chapbook of his poems in celebration of National Poetry Month, April, 2014. |
