Old Pilot School

I think there may be a few ghosts at my studio out in old Pilot School,

though they seem like lost children in there, looking for yesterday to me,

sad but not malevolent. 

-Note to Byron Hoot 9/11/2026

Poetry

Poetry is like weaving a tapestry or a spiders web, it is mystical really. The muse has found you and so begins the dance. 

Correspondence with P.S. Colley 5/28/2026

Bishop Seraphim Sigrist 2/7/2026

We lost a true light here on this earth today-he will be greatly missed...

I know Bishop Sigrist is not gone forever, but gone to forever and we will see him again on the other side. I met Seraphim J Sigrist back in 2003 or so after reading his LiveJournal and he has been a spiritual Father and friend for me. Thank you for being a light and a guide in this world for me. I will miss our conversations, your deep wisdom and your kind and gentle ways.

*Sharing also Seraphim's LiveJournal

@ https://seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com/

and his books at Amazon for any interested

@ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bishop-Seraphim-Sigrist/author/B079CJD3CS

Note to Duncan M.

We lost our friend of many years yesterday Bishop Seraphim Sigrist (from New York)

at 85 and have been spending the last several days thinking about him

and his writings and our long friendship as well.

You can check out his journal  

@ https://seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com/

and his books at Amazon if interested

@ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bishop-Seraphim-Sigrist/author/B079CJD3CS

Seraphim was like a lighthouse in the middle of a hurricane and he will be missed around here.

He invited our band on many occasions to play live for his Transfiguration Fellowship which we did via the web and he was always so gracious and kind to us.

Seraphim's work was eternal here and he made an impact on my life that will last forever.

The snow is still here on the mountain, but it seems that warmer days and Spring may not be too far off now. It is always good to hear from you Brother.

PEOD Timeline

 

T’ang Poetry, Li Ho and the Influence on the French Symbolist Movement

 I realized that the best of what the French Symbolists (like Baudelaire and Rimbaud) had to offer really began with the T’ang period and Poets like Li Ho (Li He) and it was a thousand  years earlier that these early Poets laid the true groundwork for what would become the symbolist movement (which I believe is a monumental and unrivaled period for later poetry).

8/29/2025

Note To Byron Hoot About Poetic Dialog

I had the idea that all of my poems were like a conversation and that I could enter

into any part of it again, making the dialog of nearly 40 years full of new

opportunities. I decided to take old sections of poems and converse with them a bit poetically,

like having a talk or corresponding with myself in my 20’s, 30’s, 40's and now 50's.

The old poems do not need altering in any way, and I try to retain the flow stylistically too.

It is like having a talk with an old friend. There are new poems to be met on the road of now too 

of course, but this dialog with the years seems needed somehow too.

8/7/2025

Note to P.S. Colley on Poetry and the Creative Process

If you were directing a movie for example, you would have notes first, kind of like a road map of what you wanted to explore in the poem, then a first draft using those notes, then a draft to blog, then a draft to Word.. but this is what has worked for me, and yours may be different of course.

Being attuned to the divine frequency (the Holy Spirit muse) is also important.

Some of it seems unconscious to me as well, or subconscious.

6/22/2025

Project End of Days Selected Poems 1987-2027

 I started writing poetry in 1987 while I was an Undergraduate at Viginia Tech.  Almost 40 years later I am still writing and painting and making music with our bands Spectral Arts & Project Morning Star, which feels like a great blessing still to recieve from Heaven after all of these years. The Beginning of the End and Light & Shadow remain ongoing and Vandalia (the companion to The River of Swans) will also be ongoing. Many of these recent poems will be included in  Project End of Days Selected Poems 1987-2027, however this book will not be a collected works at this time. Wildflowers will be a return to my early poetic form (Notebook Poems) combined with recent poetic revelation and will also be ongoing until I am no longer able to write here on Earth.

May 12, 2025

Virginia

Poetic Conversation

I realized just recently that my remaining poems could be added to works in progress, I began by adding a few poems to the River of Swans and to Wish List today and my plan is to have a kind of poetic conversation with some of the poems in each sequence of work. I hope to do the same with Vandalia as soon as it is finished and my final selection of poems will be Wildflowers, which is a conversation with my earliest Notebook Poems in many respects.

3/27/2025

The Pasture by Robert Frost

One of my earliest (and most impactful) memories of poetry is a song titled "The Pasture" by Robert Frost that my Father’s Glee Club at Virginia Tech had recorded onto vinyl and was around my house growing up. I remember the lyrics resonated deeply within my spirit and the hushed voices of the ending were eternal in their resonance.  Listening to the song performed again always brings me “the gift of tears”.

The Pasture

BY ROBERT FROST

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

https://youtu.be/K4pbUQOnHis?si=WB-1g_gnzpUg6J54

Nikki Giovanni Letter @ Virginia Tech Special Collections

Dear Kelly and English Department,

I am an English Department Alumni (1990) and Instructor/Tutor

locally of many years. I wrote a letter to Nikki Giovanni while I was in

graduate school and after Nikki's recent passing I wanted to share it with Virginia Tech

and Newman Library. I am going to meet with Special Collections today (2/26/2025) to bring the hand written letter over (from Summer of 1995) and I wanted to touch base with you in the Department as well. Please visit my own archive @ https://projectendofdays.blogspot.com/2022/08/letter-to-nikki-giovanni-1994.html

to read the letter and see a photo of it as well.The letter will be at Virginia Tech in special collections after today.

Thank you for your time and please let me know if you have any questions. 

With best wishes always,

-T. Byron Kelly

Link to letter at VT Special Collections @

https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=oai/VT/repositories_2_resources_4430.xml

PEOD ARCHIVE GALLERY 2/14/2025

 

https://sites.google.com/view/peod-archive/virtual-gallery

The River of Swans 1995 Vandalia 2025

 

The Poetic Story Line

Diggendicht was an extension of transcendentalism for me after a time-"beauty rests content with itself" was how Goethe put it. I am still interested in the poetic story line. The art of Rilke's in-seeing as giving the object a consciousness of its own. My early poems were greatly influenced by the dialecticism of William Blake and the visionary surrealism of Jim Morrison. The later poems merge elements of the French symbolists, Emersonian Transcendentalism and the ancient oriental aesthetic of Li Ho and Wei Tai. I paint poems and found a kind of home there> My paintings have always been rather cartoon like and fantastically oriented, a rendering of a dream if you will- I always thought (about realist art) that if you wanted a photograph then why not take a snapshot with a camera?  

credits

2015

Rimbaud’s Illuminations

I remember discovering Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations around 1994 or so and thinking that those poems were the pinnacle of his artistic expression and perhaps poetry itself in terms of subject matter and beauty. I soon set out to write The River of Swans, Advent (Omega) and much later Vandalia (the continuation of the River of Swans) , which all utilized the (open and suggestive) prose poem form that Rimbaud employs so well throughout Illuminations. 

9/19/2024

The Poetic Vocation

I always thoight the poetic vocation was to be 

as Hesse said "the bearer of human longing" and 

to convey Divine mystery. I think about the "ordinary extraordinary"

as Goethe put it as well that surrounds us all of the time.

The Poet's Year @ https://tbyron.livejournal.com/496630.html

has always given great insight since 1990 or so.

Correspondence with P.S. Colley

9/9/2024

Midnight Poems 1994-95

 https://sites.google.com/view/peod-archive/first-draft-manuscripts?authuser=0

William Blake

Early on @ Virginia Tech I discovered William Blake and his remarkable relief etchings (a method taught to him by the ghost of his own Brother) and his combining poetry and art changed the way I approached my own work forever. @ https://www.blakearchive.org/

Language of Light

My poetry, music and art have always been a place for me of supernatural communion between the divine and earthly realms.The liberation of the ordinary is finding the eternal in the moment now-there is a sacred space of connection which transcends time itself and is born through spontaneity and my work has been to attempt to bring forth this language of light.
Thank you for sharing my "Heartsongs”. 

Stopping By A Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost & Illustrated by Susan Jeffers

This is my Father’s favorite poem, and he read it out loud to my Sister and I many times on cold Virginia Winter nights. It is a visionary and beautiful work, full of transcendental images and mystery that Frost’s conveys quite beautifully and simply. This poem and the wonderful illustrations of this book (along with "The Pasture” by Frost) were the first multimedia experiences I had with poetry as well (long before William Blake and Jim Morrison in College). The artwork is an amazing compliment to the poetry and makes story time a joy. Frost’s "The Pasture” was also a  poem performed by Cadets in the Virginia Tech Glee club that I discovered in my Father’s old record collection with him singing on it and these works opened the door of possibility for me in terms of what poetry could be. When I found this book again I sent it to my Dad, it was a gift he gave me and my Sister long ago that changed my life forever.

https://www.livejournal.com/away?to=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FStopping-Woods-Snowy-Evening-Robert%2Fdp%2F0525467343