Poems

The lines between prosody, stories, prose-poems, and poetry are wonderfully indistinct. Perhaps my favorite distinction, where the boundaries may be exceptionally vague, is that poetry often explicitly uses positioning on the page as one dimension of what we might call “meta punctuation.” While line breaks, indentation, or changes in typography need not define physical pauses or changes in the timing and emphasis of delivery, nevertheless they imbue otherwise adjacent lines with some differentiation that transcends the syntax of prose. Another distinctive quality of much poetry is its independence from mechanics, from grammar and syntax. While creative prose-poem forms may do all these same things, formal distinction between prose-poems and poetry per se may prove to be little more than a taximetric exercise. In the main, poetry is, I believe, meant to be heard, wherever possible; to that end, all poems here will soon be available as MP3 readings by the author.

The poems listed here come from many decades of verbal musing and exploration, and express much of the same experimental penchant that fires the diversity of the stories, some of which may be prose-poems posted in the wrong section. Please enjoy the poems for what they are; I hope the words may amuse you, or puzzle or inspire, and perhaps imbue a little music into the language.