Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 7, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. In addition to screenwriting, short stories, and novels, Ray Bradbury wrote poetry all his life. As with other successful prose writers, it was an avocation (Faulkner and Hemingway all the way to Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver). Bradbury's poetry is racy with Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Beats. He loved the sound of words, the harmonies possible, and his prose can rush down a story like a mountain freshet when the snow melts. He controls it carefully, however, a discipline he is not often credited. I discovered his poetry in the 70s with the two books here, and I can still chant passages I learned then. I hope sometime soon to track them down in my library, but he would be amused how memorization has stuck with me all these decades (a key part of Fahrenheit 451, after all). He eventually published 9 books of poetry, one a "complete," typically in the middle of his output (something that would also make him laugh). He had a great laugh.