Welcome to my blog! My name is Abram Newcomer, and I've created this site as a place for me to post poetry, articles, and selections. This blog is primarily a space for my poems to see the light of day (for better or worse), to receive feedback from those interested, and, ultimately, to grow in my ability to write.
This is also a space for me to publish articles on the various topics that take up residence in my mind. These may be related to beauty or story, theology or art, or even the mechanics of some poetic form that I find myself interested in.
The Author
To begin, I am a husband, a father, and servant of King Jesus (aka a Christian). I live in upstate New York in a pleasantly small town with an ordinary job. I graduated from Grove City College with a BS in Physics and have a keen delight in math and programming. My family and I attend Emmanuel Community Church where we are active members in a beautiful community.
Not by my own choice, I have always had a love for poetry. This love stems more from it as a music to be heard than an expression of "raw emotions" as it is often perceived. Because of this, I endeavor to approach poetry, whether through reading or writing, as something delightful to hear before it is good to understand. I have a particular interest in formal poetry, that which is constrained in terms of syllables, stresses, and rhyme. Some of my favorite poets are Edgar Allan Poe, Tennyson, George Herbert, and John Donne.
"Who made the eyes but I?"
...is taken from George Herbert's "Love (III)" poem. This poem, and this line specifically, has been particularly meaningful in my own understanding and appreciation of the beauty that we find throughout our world. My theory of aesthetics, that which has motivated my building of this blog, condenses down into the following three points:
- God owns all beauty
- God is gracious with his beauty
- All beauty points to Christ
You can read more about this framework and my approach to beauty in the following thesis article.
Abram Newcomer
Specifics about this Site
Formatting of poems
It is a massive irritation to me whenever I read a poem whose lines, being too long, are cut short and wrap onto the next line. Publishing poetry in this way does considerable damage to the look and experience of the poem as a whole. And it is done all too frequently as we view more and more content on our narrow phones.
Because of this, I've customized the formatting of the poems in my blog such that they will never wrap. Instead, if the line is too long, a horizontal scrollbar will appear for you to slide. This was, by far, the better alternative and helps to preserve the integrity of each line of poetry.
AI use
Inexplicably, poetry was one of the first things that AI was shown to be able to produce. It can be easily prompted to produce a poem in any specific meter, on any specific topic, and even in the style of any author. We are now at the point where any written text on the internet can be the result of an AI.
As such, it's worth stating that AI will never be used to produce any written content on this blog, both poems and articles. The purpose of this blog was for me to hone my own abilities at "poet-ing," so it would completely undermine that purpose to resort to AI.
