A distinctive and incomparable collection from "Mighty" Mike McGee, the class clown of spoken word and poetry slam's geek champion. This debut includes his most notable performance poems, stories, humorous anecdotes and how-to's. This handbook moves between serious love tomes, like "Open Letter to Neil Armstrong" and "Every Day," to his most irreverent and requested works, like "Puddin'" and "Like." A true road-dog, McGee travels with words and camera, many results of which are captured in this collection. The humor contained in these pages are a campfire on a lonely winter night, the poetry – a reason to shout about love.
A timely piece of fiction written with an urgency for the masses. Describing the chemical nature of time, space, heaven and hell; and each individual's inherent responsibility for the smooth operation of the universe. A poet's thoughts from mundane to spatial. A reminder to us all to question and answer daily, "Who I Am"! Always be careful how you knot the string.
Cult poet and musician Mike Doughty makes his print debut with Slanky, a black-comic stroll through the demimonde of pop culture and modern urban life. Doughty's poems are at once absurdest and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he re imagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in "For Charlotte, Unlisted" he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.
Poets were rock stars and for a brief moment, as all halcyon days inevitably are, they touched the live nerve of the popular culture and the sizzled zap was heard from the London Sunday Times to MTV. It was the 1990's and not since the Beats banged their bongos, had poetry, this proudly obscure art-form practiced by teenaged girls and goggled academics, hit out like the super swing of a juiced-up baller into the stratosphere of the larger audience. At the center of this movement was a "muddle-class" (his term) poet enamored of the outsider status, from both faux-bohemia and the high-tea-toned academy, of his Americanist Poetic heroes, Whitman, Stevens and Williams; he wanted to connect them to the direct, jagged, jaw-displacing punk rock rebellion of the music and performances he loved. His name is Mike Tyler, and to poets of his time and the youth that saw him read in the cafes, he is a legendary wild and free performer who ran and yelled and jumped as he read his work and who as The Village Voice described doesn't recite a poem, "he exorcises it like it was the demon within." In Black Night, Black Knight, a time when phone booths still existed, you could smoke on planes, and Richard Nixon had just died (an event which gave Mike one of the shortest of the always remarkable shorter poems that appear throughout the book, "good") you can find the poems Mike was writing at this time when his fame, such as it was, we're talking poetry after all, was at its height (Mike coined the phrase "there's tens of dollars at stake ") and the fever from the wondrous disease for a poet of having attention paid and being listened to was red-hot and molten. From "A Mike Tyler Poem" to "You Can't Hide In A Clear Sky" and the 281 poems in between in alphabetical order and interrupted only by the book within a book of Paris Poems (filed under P after "Old Centurion") written by Mike from a visit to Paris following a triumphant residency at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), you have a moment of poetic time brought back to life so that life itself can take a bow, for what are words but the harbingers of the things and the times that inspired them.
A cult poet and former lead singer of the rap/rock group Soul Coughing makes his print debut with this black-comic stroll through pop culture and urban life. In a series of prose poems, he conjures images thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay.
My Poet Tree reflects my personal journey through life expressed in verse From the consequences of war in Painted In Red to the emotional turmoil of lost love in Crippled Smiles. We cross a landscape where the frailty of age is captured in Of Our Lives. Then we pause for a moment to consider the guilt or innocence in This Cell My Prison, before moving on to the fragile state of this planet in I Challenge The Day. there are many twists and emotions are examined throughout the book an example being We Wear It Well. Occasionally we stop to smile as in There's An Elephant In My Garden. Before dipping in to memories of childhood as revisited in There's A Secret In My Cupboard. Then we leave behind the absurdity of imagined horror in Reaper; to slip into self-awareness in Made Of Stone. Along the way we will relive the terror of an ocean storm in The Sinking Of The Santa Fe. Then move to a poem titled That's My Life, an attempt to understand the things that motivate the way we are. Included is a tribute to a great poet in An Ode To Edgar Allan Poe. So I welcome you to join me, and share the experiences and memories that is My Poet Tree
A crazed woman watches as a heard of wild animals stampedes through the house. A homeless Vietnam Vet chases a pair of elusive shoes across the city. On the last day of his career, a newly retired civil servant returns to his home only to find that everything he owns has suddenly disappeared. A desperate mother sacrifices her children in a futile effort to ward off danger. Sifting Through The Madness is a collection of strange characters and unusual stories that will delight, confound, frighten, entertain and leave the reader with an experience hard to forget. In his first collection of short fiction, originally published in electronic form and brought to print here for the first time, poet and fiction writer Mike Maggio delves full force into the modern human condition taking the reader breathlessly with him on a journey into lives and places that will remain in memory long after the reading is finished.
Free Spirited with Salty Lyric Waves Poet Mike Harris pens his disillusions on his own terms and comes up with truth, philosophy, epiphany and catharsis-in-jest Beaufort, South Carolina. – (Release Date TBD) – For a surety (shoe-rate-ey), True Adventures of the Floating Poet, Mike Harris’ collection of verse, is not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But it is as salt- and barnacle-encrusted as that distant predecessor. Born out of a need to get away from Wall Street-induced (and ultimately fake) problems, self-styled Capt. Mike left for the Caribbean on a normal day in New York. All poets who have followed the seabreeze to a life of adventure on the waves share the author’s respect for the sensible in the face of chance and nature. From the first poem “The Holy Clam and the birth of Clamism,” the author divests himself of the trappings of the “civilized” jungles of boardroom and yuppie restaurants, distances himself from them because they induce spiritual phobia, and rides out on the crests of a versified ocean like Neptune riding sea-horses. Not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s (author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) famous sojourn into pre-Castro Cuba, this Mike Harris’ “vacation” has produced an awesome, seismic new reading of the largely unspotlighted areas of the American dream that few except the disillusioned intellectuals get to comment on. Both Thompson and Harris, like Coleridge, do not get to drink much water. In both the modern writers’ cases, whiskey (or perhaps rum, in Harris’ case) is the philosophical lubrication of choice. The difference is that Harris holds out some hope for the reader whom this volume will surely hook – it makes Harris an excellent, not quite indifferent, grungy, but compassionate fisher of men. He who floats has surely lived to tell a deeply funny, ultimately meaningful, compelling tale...
It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.
Emotions. Life. The saying goes that the eyes are the windows to your soul. Given that to be true, then I submit that life's experiences are the lifeline to the heart. For every experience, there is a new piece added to the heart. With each new experience, comes an emotion. Many come with emotions. Many emotions are new, many are somewhat the same,yet independent of themselves. Each also carries varying degrees at which each emotion is felt...each experience a piece, of varying size, of the heart. And it's the culmination of those experiences that make up our heart. Which emotions do we feel strongest? Which emotions seem to control us? Which emotions make us weak. We all experience differently, create differently, and envision differently. We all have varying degrees of emotions, through our experiences and through our creativity and visions. This collection of experiences will take the reader into a past of memories, triggering thoughts and maybe a smile or two. This collection may take the reader into a present thought process, triggering experiences that readers may be encountering now. Finally, this collection will take the reader deep into thought about their visions of the future. This is a feel good collection of poems that will set the reader at ease, yet will delve into some deep emotions. Enjoy!
Set in the urban Chicago landscape, Central Air explores the human challenge of living with strong desires, limited knowledge, and no saving direction. The voices in this mix of elegies and soft litanies negotiate lives within the strangeness and unpredictability of each moment. In every case, language is a swift prayer, ode, and lyric. Chicago is an intensely experienced, blue-collar homeplace where injustice is a given. The poems are stern, compressed, and unsentimental. But they are also empathic to human shortcomings and doubts, scored in unobtrusive consistency in both voice and language. Puican’s focus on the city, its people and underbellied spaces, pays homage in the tradition of the great Chicago masters: Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Campbell McGrath. This contemporary Chicago son finds his own place with lyrical integrity.
Mike Santucci is a Boston based poet. He has been writing poetry for the better part of five years and has circulated a few limited edition chap books. A Peek Inside My Head is a collection of work throughout the past year and a half that explores love, loss, heartache and heartbreak to this collection.
How many roads have been memorialized in poetry? Can't think of one?" the author asks. "Let me suggest Santa Fe's Canyon Road, the Art and Soul of Santa Fe, ' he replies, "celebrated and legendary. But in the eyes of some, the City Different, as Santa Fe is called, a national treasure, the nation's highest capital, has become a high desert Disneyland, a small city in search of an identify, 'tourist-town U.S.A., ' a caricature of itself. That's just my opinion, of course. I think this book humanizes some wonders and some warts." The author, who lived "off the Road" for close to 20 years, uses poetry, often in formal form, to capture and capsulize the inconsistencies between the City of the Holy Faith and its sometimes indelicate "Road," while evoking and provoking emotions, the purpose of poetry. You will be pleased you joined us. Mike Sutin is a commercial lawyer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and serves as pro-bono counsel to PEN New Mexico and the New Mexico Book Association. He is a member of both. His volunteer work for his street and neighborhood, and directorships on his neighborhood association and business and economic development organizations, afford insider sensitivity into the good, bad and ugly of Santa Fe's Canyon Road. His poems have appeared in local, regional, and national small presses, and anthologies.
Being alive in Los Angeles means driving It means having friends in a hundred neighborhoods. Everyday I figure 8 my way through the blood & bones of the city. These journeys invigorate me. Connecting the dots is what I like to do, from the hilltop parties to the Watts Towers, North Long Beach to Frogtown, there's o much flavor-landscape & characters. I love it all. I Am ALIVE IN LOS ANGELES! In this progressive collection of poems. Essays & notes, Mike the PoeT digs into the real Los Angeles. Passages of charged prose & poetic snapshots capture the panorama of the city of angels. Pieces cover the mythical afterhour parties, unique architecture, socioeconomics, graffiti, gangs Hollywood & more. Poet Journalist Historian, Mike Sonksen aka Mike the PoeT has performed at the L.A. Times Book Prizes, Divine Forces Radio, Music Plus TV & published hundreds of poems & articles in the LA. Citybeat, O,C. Weekly, Jointz, Kotori & so on. "It's easy to target Los Angeles' deficits: flashiness, venality, gross disparity of wealth. But is takes rare understanding and eloquence to see this fair city in all its lights, both good and bad. Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the Poet, achieves that unusual feat with his debut spoken-word release, "I Am Alive in Los Angeles!" A third-generation L.A. native Sonksen has special insight into the multi-textured realities that comprise the city."-L.A. Alternative Press "Mike the Poet the most cool, positive guy in poetry, future LA legend you read it here first." -TEKA LARK LO
Scott Ezell s book-length poem Petroglyph Americana was published by Empty Bowl Press in 2010. Yusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994 for Neon Vernacular. Thomas Merton wrote more than seventy books on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism. He was a Trappist monk, and pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, D.T. Suzuki, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Mike O'Connor is a poet, writer, and translator of Chinese. He has published eight books, most recently Immortality and Unnecessary Talking: The Montesano Stories (both from Pleasure Boat Studio). He has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and an Artist Trust Fellowship.
How Many Faces Do You Have? is a poem sequence that interrogates intimacy, each poem a face the poet discovers, a reflection revealed in response to inner questioning. In a voice of quiet sonority, these lyrics journey from a high-school gym dance to a moonlit beach polka. They linger over sushi in Montreal and an airline meal at 40,000 feet on a flight. They touch joy and pain and celebrate the vicissitudes of love that goes “into the tangled heartland / where there is no trail,” as a gift of being. A face is such a strange thing. Obsessed with distortion, Modigliani loved elongated faces like Tamara’s at a distance, a flattened oval, two black jewels. He painted with a dagger in his teeth, they say, to see the face within the face — grave, cold-eyed as Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, whom I’ve always loved for her name alone.
Where to Begin is a dialogue about poetry by two poets engaged in friendship yet speaking from different traditions. The lively exchange includes talk of common friends and interests, recent work by themselves and others, and the experience of living and writing in the modern world.
Mike Tuggle, poet laureate of Sonoma County for 2008-2009, was a poet-teacher in the California Poets in the Schools program from 1971-2003 in San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma counties. "Whether he's 'filling with light of stars/ and the approaching moon' or a photograph of Dorothea Lange's, Tuggle 'will not look away from the truth/ of what (he) sees.'" Bill Vartnaw, author of "Suburbs of my Childhood" Mr. Tuggle is the recipient of a Sonoma County Foundation Award in Poetry, The Dickens Award in Fiction and the Oberon Poetry Prize. He is the co-author of "Cazadero Poems" with the poet Susan Kennedy, a chapbook published by Floating Island Press; "Absolute Elsewhere," his first full collection, published by Philos Press; "The Singing Itself," published by Running Wolf Press, and "What Lures the Foxes," a chapbook published by Kelly's Cove Press. He was Poet Laureate of Sonoma County for 2008-2009. He lives in Cazadero with his cats.
Set over the course of one Sunday, The Slow Midnight on Cypress Avenue is a collection of interconnected vignettes that takes the reader through the streets and across sidewalks of Cypress Avenue—an unkempt afterthought, just a place that sits at the neighborhood border edge of Ridgewood Queens, NY. The three-part book—broken into Morning, Afternoon, and Night—introduces you to the irregular regulars of the human race. There is the soft and strange relationship between the eccentric Samuel Jean and a young girl of Puerto Rican descent named Desponda “Dezzy” Rivera. There’s “Old” Goldie Samuels, a washed-up relic who spends her days spinning yarns and getting free drinks at the local liquor store. But the story is truly centered on Corporal Benjamin Zogby, a veteran who spends his days alone on his stoop watching the bus go by and wishing his love would return to him. It’s his tragic fate that sends the avenue and the other inhabitants you’ll meet—Earl the fisherman, Father John White, among others—into an unstoppable tailspin toward unexpected change and inner destruction.
Mike Wahl is a farmer-philosopher who takes on subjects as small as what kind of plant Japanese beetles like best (Smart-weed) and as large as the fall of the Roman empire. His true subject, however, is the human heart, and how often we fail in our relationships with others, our environment, and our society. Still, there are moments, in "the temporary camaraderie of exuberance," when we can envision a better world. In Wahl's poems, second chances abound, even in the sounds of our words, as when we move from "razing" to "raising." -Jennifer Horne is the Poet Laureate of Alabama and the author of three books of poetry, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light In Harmony with Homophones represents a daunting undertaking of building bridges of meaning between words that sound alike. But for this clever poet managing the mating game of homophones such as I'll/aisle/isle seems to come naturally. Part of the joy of reading the poems is anticipating just how he is going to harmonize each set. And between the inaugural word of a poem such as "one" and the final word "won" come the observations and wisdom of a farmer, thinker, poet. -Jeanette Willert, it was never Eden & Appalachia, Amour Mike Wahl's In Harmony with Homophones is a clever and entertaining scamper through some of the ironies and unexpected associations to be found in English. His well-controlled lines keep steady pace with the natural rhythm and music of the language as we relish its unexpected treasures and absurdities, all the while ranging over a broad panorama of subject matter and theme where Philosophy, Linguistics, Agriculture, and even some Theology come tied together by a durable strand of humor. -James Miller Robinson, author of The Caterpillars at Saint Bernard, Boca del Río in the Afternoon, and The Empty Chair
Mike Dailey wrote occasional poems for a Sunday School class when he lived and worked in the Washington DC area. When he retired and moved to NC he promised his former classmates a poem a week for a year. This book is a reflection of that promise and much more. In rhythm and rhyme he tells Bible stories, stories of ordinary people, the passing of loved ones, songs and prayers, and an occasional bit of humor in his spiritual world. You'll find laughter and tears, hope and understanding, in these poems and want to share them with friends and family. Mike Dailey is a poet living in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, with his wife of 43 years. His first book of poetry was a year-long poetic journal of his cancer treatment. His second was a poetic tribute to the military. He writes in rhythm and rhyme covering the gamut from spirituals, to children's rhymes, to snippets of life seen through a poets eyes. You are bound to find something you like in his collections of poetry.
A diagnosis of ADHD at age fifty-five can make you stop and think. So can losing your daughter to a drunk driver two days after her eighth birthday—or looking up at the majesty of the Big Buddha in Phuket after getting lost in the mountains on the way there. Spanning a period from high school in the seventies until a few hours before it went to the editor, the poems in Provisional Conclusions explore these topics and more: being a parent, being a man, living with ADHD, the legacy of Howard Thurman, the myth of objectivity, the delight and terror of raising a family, the dreams of Korczak Ziolkowski, and even a quick peek into hell. Poet Mike Fedel also considers race, sex, love lost and found, philosophy, consciousness, and God—what is she like, anyway? Sections include “Thinking Out Loud,” “The ADHD Chapter,” “Loss,” and “Love and Nervous Energy.” Offering accessible observations on a wide range of topics, the verses in this collection consider the raw emotions associated with love, grief, and ADHD. “...powerful and poignant poems which capture a father’s experience of losing his 8 year-old daughter...” —Irving Leon, Ph.D. “...the poetry of a brilliant, often misunderstood ADHD mind, trapped in a linear world...” —Suzanne Ostrowski-Dansel, M.Ed., ACC “...fresh, moving poems by Mike Fedel, an important new voice in music and now in poetry...” —Anna Boothe, Author of “I Already Love You,” “Beyond Words,” and “Buddha.”
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