Executive summary : All the poems that have been posted on this blog are now available  at Madhava Gosh’s Poetry Anthology

Long winded details:  Bhagavad Gita is the Song of God, not the Essay of God. It is poetry, as is much of Sanskrit based scripture.   Sometimes it seems amongst devotees that analyzing it is more important than appreciating it. Of course as devotees we are all struggling to make some advancement and the ideal platform remains as  goals. What are those goals?

“These qualities of a devotee, twenty-six in number, are listed as follows: (1) kind to everyone, (2) does not quarrel with anyone, (3) fixed in the Absolute Truth, (4) equal to everyone, (5) faultless, (6) charitable, (7) mild, (8) clean, (9) simple, (10) benevolent, (11) peaceful, (12) completely attached to Krsna, (13) has no material hankering, (14) meek, (15) steady, (16) self-controlled, (17) does not eat more than required, (18) sane, (19) respectful, (20) humble, (21) grave, (22) compassionate, (23) friendly, (24) poetic, (25) expert, (26) silent. “

Srimad Bhagvatam 4.20.16

Since poetry hasn’t seemed to me to be a lifestyle in ISKCON, I have tried in my own limited way to open a door to it. On writing poetry sites you will hear the same thing over and over again, a variation on, “The best way to learn about writing poetry is to read good poetry.” So I have tried to send out a steady stream of what IMHO is good poetry.

My hope is that those seeing it will at least become comfortable in the  presence of poetry  and it won’t seem alien. Hopefully it will help some come to the platform of writing poetry, or at least making their prose more poetic.

Over the years I have posted a lot of poems, 249 to be exact.  I tried to manually make an index of the titles on a Page on my blog, but there were some quirks in the WordPress word processor so I always seemed to have some difficulty in posting links and eventually the chore of keeping the thing updated slipped a little and in no time I was so far behind I abandoned hope of catching up.

WordPress came out with a new thing. You simply put the shortcode [*archives] in a Page and it automatically lists all the titles in your blog in chronological order. (Actually, it did it also in this post, so I had to insert an extra character in the shortcode (*) to make it not function so if you use this drop the “*”)  That was great  because I wanted to have an easier way to look through older posts without tediously backtracking through a few posts on a screen at a time.

But I also wanted to be able to do it with a  category and periodically sent in requests to WordPress to make it so. No dice. It has become more sophisticated because now you can filter by date, but still no filter for category.

I was able to export all the poems (the Export feature does have a category filter) and popped them into a new blog. Using [*archives] I now have an index solely of  poems. When I post on my blog, I use a Press This to easily it add to the anthology.

So if you are interested in reading some selected poetry, you can at Madhava Gosh’s Poetry Anthology.  The Page with the index can be linked to in the header of this new blog or by clicking here. There is also a link on the Poet’s Poetry page in this blog.

I even made its own Facebook  page as that seems to be the way people view the world anymore. So welcome aboard.