The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh
As long as it lasts
Shuts out the woes of the world
- Andre Breton

I am in the process of publishing three volumes of poetry (Poetopia: A Life in Three Volumes,” that, as a group, describe my journey thus far as a writer, traveler, and human citizen. Though I have been publishing poetry since I was a child, this journey began, in earnest, about fifteen years ago. The three volumes are: “Implosions at the Festival of Self,” “On Love and Revolution,” and “Rock and Roll Poet.”

All of my poems from Implosions (1994) onward have dealt with human freedom of the existential variety. Whether it is freedom from tyranny, or poverty, or freedom from the shackles of capitalist and judeo-Christian ideologies, I am interested in how the human subject finds herself and her place outside of the various discursive constraints that she operates within. This poetic mission is similar to that of Foucault’s philosophical one; to separate the subject from knowledge. Who are we outside of what we have been taught? What we have come to know as “truth?” What a great place for the work of a poet to begin. I must admit, this journey through poetry has largely been a personal journey; me attempting to write myself outside of my own constraining narratives. The anchor poems in Implosions, “implosives” and “conciliations: to the cherubs who mourn,” are both a search for liberation, for new values, for new ways of saying. They are, technically, not even words from the lexicon. They force you to look at them and say, “is that a word?” It is now; its my word, because there weren’t any that I could hold onto to make sense of what I was feeling. Implosions literally means a violent explosion inwards; implosives are the devices, the words, that facilitate that detonation. They are my ignition fuse and torch; or at least they were when I needed them. “Conciliations” is me making peace with those angelic-types in my life who would mourn for decisions that would most certainly lead to my entrance into the fiery pit of hell. Coincidentally, the first vision of the poem arrived as I entered the valley leading to Los Angeles on a smoggy summer day; talk about a pit. These poems, though, are the cries of a twenty-something poet who knows he needs out and is trying to follow those words to the highway and to freedom. I experimented with form with the poems in Implosions, which were a marked shift from the verse of my youth. I wanted poems that didn’t rhyme, obviously, but I also wanted poems that were void of any form and so the blocked form is also a play on form and forces you to focus only on the words as they ramble across the page. There is also a certain pace; frenzy, that runs through the poem, just like the twenty-five year old loaded up on angst and caffeine-petrol. This is the pace of a mind at work. They are the crazy thoughts of a demented mind; thought alone in the dark or staring out west toward the ocean-horizon. Thoughts only whispered to the self in shame. And so, once the courage is tattooed on the cerebellum those whispers become five page screaming rants of catharsis. I also wanted no capital letters. We are in a period of no capitals; an era of competing micro-narratives and loss and nihilism, where no one is willing to believe in anything, not even love and definitely not peace. Although the volume is essentially a hopeful one and a homage to the twenties, it recognizes the eternal night and the farce that is existence. What can I say; I read a lot of Sartre.

On Love and Revolution takes up two topics that are on the periphery of all of my poems and places them at the epicenter; what does it mean to love? What is needed to realize the goals of revolution? It took 33 years (in the year of Jesus and Castro and Bruce Lee) of living to understand the relationship between the two; between love and the revolution; that at some level, they were one and the same. The revolution is love and love is a revolution. And true love is revolutionary, romantic love, love of freedom, a love of words, or a love of people. And so I set out to write an honest tome that explored the multiple manifestations of love and the various aesthetics of revolution. And in the process, I found my own new aesthetic of poetry. I also think that during this period my intellectual and artistic influences shifted from Sartre and de Beauvoir’s austere existentialism to the passionate, lyrical poetry of Neruda. I had written passionate texts, but not many texts about passion per se. Through Neruda I began to conceptualize the poet as lover, artist, and revolutionary and I also began to discover a different poetic aesthetic; a slower, more deliberate pace; crafting words; short lines that dangle and force us to contemplate a single word. I also became enamored of the idea of having a multitude of short verses forming a larger meta-poem. I find myself thinking in verses, in mantras, like the poems of Antonio Machado. The first anchor poem “21 poems” is really a collection of 21 terse, compact, bomb-like verses that together tell a tale of descent and resurrection that are the story of love and revolution. Really, it is the story of life. Even laying flat on our backs we can look up and see the stars. Seven (twenty-one is seven three times), by the way, is one of the through-themes of the text. Another theme is the stars, and space, and the cosmos. Intoxication is a theme. There are others. And there are other poems yet to be written including the culminating text, “On Love and Revolution” which will also be a multi-versed poem that brings out the final theme; imagination.

The final volume, “Rock and Roll Poet,” represents one life on the highway of me. Quite literally, the volume reflects my travels as a record label owner and college professor, but it also deals with the journey from young adulthood toward middle age. I reach a point where I am able to see a great deal of the world and I offer tributes to its great cities, cultures, and people. But I am also of an age where I am able to begin asking very big questions about my purpose, my values, and my trajectory through life. Once the adolescence of adulthood has ended, we have only ourselves to look to. During this year I lost my last grandparent and turned very significant corners in terms of age and career. But mostly, “Rock and Roll Poet,” is not a lament of impending middle age, it is a celebration, substantively and lyrically, of a lifestyle in opposition to the mainstream values. In fact, it is an explicit critique of the mundane and it is a celebration of a life of travel, of love, of activism, and of creative production. We all have a little rock star in us, that hopefully hasn’t been scared away by schooling, age, and responsibilities. In these very personal poems, I am invoking the rock star poet in myself, by I hope they are helpful to others who struggle with the same issues of identity and constraint.

Where do I see myself headed with my poetry? First, just to be a poet. To admit to myself that I am always a poet first and that poetry is my true manifestation of becoming. Second to write honestly as I can. Third, to push the envelope on form; to keep experimenting. And, of course, to be productive; to write and write and write and to control the mechanisms for distribution a little more, but that is the substance of another manifesto. On the horizon is a verse poem entitled A Song for Babylon that is my poetic-ethnography of the United States as experienced by air, by wheel, and by foot; as seen from coast to coast to lake to gulf. After that, only the fates and the muses can know, but it will still deal with the limitless themes of freedom, of love, of revolution, and of the power of the Word.

PDF VERSION OF THE “IMPLOSIONS” BOOK