Tuesday, July 01, 2008





My chapbook Disharmonium is now available at the Silver Wonder Press Web site. Sometimes I look in the rearview mirror and think about the many poems I've written and why. I never felt as though writing poetry was a choice on my part. I remember first reading poets such as Ed Sanders, Clayton Eshleman, Blaise Cendrars, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Gregory Corso, Harry Matthews, Aram Saroyan, Anne Sexton, Ted Berrigan, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others and thinking "that's who I am," not "that's what I want to do." The daily struggle of rewriting a poem only to leave it in frustration, perhaps coming back to it on another day, is what I know to be the writing life--if there is one. Some come fully formed from an overheard conversation, or a half-remembered dream, and some bubble up from the memory as if they can no longer exist in the deeper imagination and must either exist on the page as something separate from me, or they disappear and are replaced by other ideas. Poetry has allowed me to meet myself halfway and try to define what I find there. When I look in the rearview mirror I don't see the Atomium in Brussels, but it makes a good photo. Thanks for listening.