TAKE FIVES

Ethan Lewis, dubbed “Poet laureate of Hawthorne Place,” writes daily, stopped only perhaps by night time: “But then again, bed beckons: ‘It is time. / You satisfied exigencies of rhyme.’” Doesn’t he declare, “Pentameter helps pass the time”? Maybe it is a way for him to keep away, at least for a while, “our fate: to disappear”; and does he know how to cry for a departed friend: “Our loss. Your gentle soul and kindest life.” Ethan Lewis does not ignore what he owes to other poets before him, whom he cites: William Blake, William Shakespeare, Homer, Charles Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns, John Wilmot, and so many others. Time is passing, but “rhymes sill limn the present century.” Ethan Lewis admits “the objective subjectivity of time” and, as a lucid poet, plays with it. Love comes and goes, but, as a visionary, Ethan Lewis can state: “I presage a renaissance of love.” Music inhabits his poems, and he celebrates many composers who have influenced him, from Sebastian Bach to Anton Bruckner, Charpentier to Corelli, Mendelssohn, with a deep knowledge and a bright kindness.

As a man living in Springfield, Ethan Lewis purposely writes poems about Chicago