NOW AVAILABLE
A NEW BOOK:
"THE FRONTIER"
A NEW BOOK:
"THE FRONTIER"
....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 settled in Western New York, where he now devotes himself to writing and collaborative work with artists and musicians.
In addition to many poetry readings he has also performed 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: The Frontier: Poetry and Prose (2017) and two prior books of poetry, Drawn by the Creek (2003) and Winter Vision (2011), the latter of which was translated into Polish and published in Warsaw in a bilingual edition that same year. Wizja w Zimie/Winter Vision was awarded the Best Book of Poetry prize at the 34th International November of Poetry festival in Poznan, Poland. In 2014 Giannetti was honored by the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection with the publication of a limited edition chapbook of his poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. In 2018 he was awarded the Homer Medal, European Medal of Poetry and Art, established in Brussels in 2016 to recognize outstanding individuals whose work presents universal messages to the world with simplicity and beauty. Also in 2018, he was one of 20 poets from around the world invited to attend an International Poetry Week with Chinese poets in Sichuan Province, China, and his contributions were published in a bilingual anthology of the proceedings. |