the INLAID EAR

Welcome virtual tourists! Make yourselves at home. It is sweet to imagine you here.  Peruse back through my 18-day poetry journal experiment, back through the sneak preview pages of poetry and illustrations that comprise my forthcoming book One Way to Ask , back through the poems I created in InDesign, all the way back to the word games I hosted, and all the random stuff in between. Enjoy your stay. Feel free to comment. Even sweeter that imaging you here is imagining that someday I might meet you in person. I love when a virtual friendship enters real life. That's a deep joy I experience in knowing Ina Roy-Faderman , who brought me into this blog tour.  I have long admired Ina's poetry on Poetic Asides , the Writer's Digest poetry blog and forum hosted by Robert Lee Brewer.  Finding out that she is only an hour away by car, I knew that we would meet in person.And so we have. I was delighted to embrace Ina and read with her at my wife Lauren 's...

With Gretchen Wegner at InterPlay. My shirt says "Writer" :) Go see!  It's me! Cara Holman's Prose Posies is one of the many great sites linked from here.

Continuing with this story. I have to warn you though... I only got as far as chapter five plus a general concept of where I might go. Read part one , if you haven't already. 2 Three hours later, I’m three sheets to the wind, camped out in the bar booth, which even now that I’m familiar with it, is as eerie as a swamp from an old horror movie. Since it remains that type of setting and I have made it my home, then I am the creature from the dismal swamp. Truth be known, I’m hoping Charles will come in. He’s been scarce since I told him to fuck off, which is typical. He takes things so personally, asshole that he is, ghost of an asshole that he is.             Night is thinking about taking this ludicrous whore of a town to bed. I can hardly wait. Because with both of them distracted by each other, I might try to sneak home unspotted. To while away the last light, I signal to Enright—that’s the barkeep—for another....

At the end of my freshman year in college, a professor loaned by Love Is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski. The 300+ page book of poetry about horseracing, prostitutes, drunkenness, despair and the rare moment of transcendence makes a strange source for an epiphany, I warrant. But as a 19-year-old who had been carrying a poetry journal for the two years or so prior, that book offered one brilliant illumination and made me forever indebted to the misanthrope poet of Los Angeles. Bukowski just wrote. He didn't wait for a subject; he didn't edit himself or circumscribe his thoughts; he didn't sweat line breaks or unpleasant odors. He wrote what he wanted. That's what Dog from Hell said to me: write what you want. Ever since then, I've thought about my relationship to Bukowski's work, and have dabbled with imaginings about his ghost. I include one of these poems in " Monster Poems ." Recently, I also uncovered a novel concept and first few chapters ...

Queron is a new poetic form I developed during the November 2009 Poem-A-Day Challenge hosted by Robert Lee Brewer at Writersdigest.com. Influenced by Rilke’s advice to “live the questions now,” I developed queron to support the way my mind engages questions—which is what it does when I write poems. Counting syllables slows me down into a state of attentive curiosity. Interweaving rhymes mirror the way the mind flashes back and forth as it grapples with questions. The stanza breaks offer opportunities to shift the perspective of the poem and consider the central question from different angles. The ending couplet can offer a sense of closure—whether an answer or a surrender to not having an answer. Writing queron requires attention to meter, rhyme and content. Here’s the recipe: Seventeen lines are grouped into three quintets and a final couplet. Each line has an equal number of syllables. Rhymes interweave in this scheme: ababa bcbca cdcdb dd. The poem includes a question....