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