Steven Insalaco

Solicitations Steven Insalaco

Solicitations is a renaissance of epic poetry. The crux of Solicitations is two epic poems: Soliciting Cicero and Soliciting Scheherazade. Soliciting Cicero is comprised of four essays: On War, God, Happiness and Love. Stylistically influenced by Alexander Pope, it is a traditional poem of heroic couplets in pentameter that offer a profound exploration into the four noted topics. Soliciting Scheherazade, stylistically influenced by surrealism, is a surrealistic chronological history of the 20th century, presented in 40 parts. Insalaco's sweeping analysis of our contemporary life and times, reveals nothing less than the darkest age in the history of civilization. The additional poems and sonnets that follow have meaning beyond the words while anticipating the reader's probe. This second edition of Solicitations includes The Ghost of Mullholland Farm, The Feast of the Nativity, and a number of other poems and sonnets including, Beyond the Peacock, Of Magnolias and Peacocks and The Elimination of Virtue: A Quartet in Sonnet. The second edition also includes two essays (in prose), calling attention to the illiteracy of the modern age, including the extant, illiterate modern academic - He Never Read Aristotle, written by the author, and A Defence of Poetry by Percy Shelley. The author hopes that Solicitations serves as a reconsideration of poetry as a philosophical and artistic discipline: "Of late, some poetry has become vile, perverse and even bizarre. Works of some of the "notable" poets, I am unable to even recognize as poetry and often read as bad prose."