I’m not sure when the practice started in my own life, but somewhere it did.

Typically, in a first visit to an art museum, I’ll move along quickly to get a sense of the fuller collection. In the returns, however, I’ve become more inclined to sit down in front of a particular piece or even a full wall or room and then more fully immerse myself in particular pieces, usually while the rest of our party roves on. Yes, I’m with notebook in hand.

Those scribblings have led to poems, especially those in which Norman Rockwell and Gertrude Stein appear commenting, somewhat like poet Lew Welch’s Buddhist Red Monk who kept popping up at the bottom of the page. I’m not quite sure how they showed up, either, but there they are, as you’ll find in recent entries at my Thistle Finch editions blog.

Let me repeat that I’m generally averse to poems about poetry or celebrating poets or that somehow place artists of any stripe above the rest of humanity, ditto that for movie stars or professional athletes or billionaires or politicians. We do need our heroes, but I’m convinced that it’s healthy to keep their human frailties and shortcomings in perspective.

In that regard, I do believe we artists need to keep our vision beyond our studio door. Anything less strikes me as incest, even for an interdisciplinary addict like me. It’s why I refuse to respond to political pollsters. Go ask somebody on the street, OK?

Still, I made the central character in my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels a photographer. Even having him make a living by working at a newspaper was skirting my taboos.

~*~

The term “ekphrasis” defines poems that describe visual artworks though it can be applied more broadly. Sometimes the results are admirable, as exemplified in music by Gunther Schuller’s “Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee” or Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

~*~

Lately, I’ve become quite fond of the Alex Katz galleries at Colby College, not just because he almost collected a painting by my first wife. Rather, I sense something in the plainness of his depicted figures and where I’d like my own work to head. It’s stripping something down to essentials.

We’ll see.

~*~

For Rockwell and Stein, take a look at at Thistle Finch editions. For Freakin’ Free Spirits, look for the four novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They novels are also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

One of the artistic ideals in my life originated in the fantastic illustrations by Inuit craftsmen as they expressed the world they inhabit. Perhaps you’ve seen some of their calendars exhibiting owls, seals, the sun itself, and the like.

As I was told by the couple who introduced me to the Inuit works, an artist in the tradition does a subject just once, at least in the position or perspective that results. A bear, for instance, might be shown standing, but only once. If a bruin shows up again, it would be fishing or lumbering along or maybe paired. Each appearance, though, must be unique. There were still plenty of ducks, geese, walruses, whales, and other Inuit – hunters, mothers, and children – remaining for close examination, even in their Arctic environment.

The husband who told me this, let me add, was a coauthor of the Alaska constitution who had some acquaintance with the ecosystem. He had grown up at its southern edge, northern Washington state.

After more than two decades with that as a guideline, I faced a conundrum as I tried to assemble my own poems for submission as a competition for a chapbook – a booklet, essentially. A book needs to flow from start and middle to an end with some sense of continuity. My one offering that had that, American Olympus, had a received a provisional acceptance from a prominent press that later rescinded, claiming a cut in their grant funding. And my other pieces hopped, skipped, and jumped from one setting to another – if only I had been able to remain in one setting long enough for continuity in their completion.

Beyond that, my own life had moved on, providing me a lode of new material to draw upon. That’s when I turned to the idea of theme and variations, a major element of the classical music I so love and also big in jazz as improvisation. What hit me, especially, was Ted Brautigan’s sonnets from the ‘60s. They were essentially three poems, reworked over and over, into a full and very stunning collection.

I took that as my springboard into two intense weeks – while working fulltime as a newspaper editor – of reworking raw notes of loved desire that had incinerated into what you can read as Braided Double-Cross – a set that was rejected by the jurors in a competition based in its principal subject’s hometown. Maybe it was too intense. The poems are searing.

The night I finished drafting the 60 poems, I should note, I went out to dinner and have no idea how much I tipped the server. I was thoroughly exhausted, not just emotionally. Not that I remember of the meal I devoured.

Love really can be such a bitch. At least it still is with me, no matter how much she wonders why I still worship the one who continues in my life.

~*~

For now, let’s turn to the question of what makes a poetry collection “hang together”? In contrast to an assembly from my “best work,” however sporadic.

For perspective, also consider my aversion to series in fiction, where I’ve seen too many series as the same book done over and over with a few tweaks, even if that has led to way too many bestsellers. Yet I’ve gone back to my novels and reworked them to create linkage from one to the next, at least in two separate series. What I think now separates mine from most series is that none of my novels is a carbon copy of any of the others. Mine do, in contrast, represent a sequencing of growth from one to the other. In that way, they create one longer epic rather than imitative episodes like a TV sitcom.

Still, what is it that draws you back to a particular author, book after book?

~*~

I think now of the observation that an author’s next book springs from what was left unsaid in the volume published just before it. That point resonates and returns us to the question of how does an author know when a work’s finished.

Regardless, I’ve definitely done much more in the vein of “series” since completing the first.

~*~

You can find Braided Double-Cross and more in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

Let’s celebrate the publication of my poetry ebook Mediterraneo this week.

As a series of poems, this book was a turning point for me. My earlier poetry had been mostly of the nature or love genres.

Here I focused on Western culture itself, through places around the Mediterranean Sea. It was someplace I’ve never visited, though it’s had a huge impact on my artistic and spiritual outlook. What I have known comes through artworks, literature, philosophy, operas, insights from my daughter and wife’s travels and those of my goddaughter and friends and even Greek Orthodox dancing and liturgy as well as ancient Hebrew scriptures. Put them all in the mixer, then, and see what we can distill.

It’s quite distinct from my ultimate roots in the British Isles and Germany.

When I created these poems, I had not yet relocated to a remote fishing village on an island in Maine after 20 years in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. The climate is colder than the Mediterranean’s, for certain, but the light of the sun does reflect off the sea and back into the sky, magnifying the luminance in a way that attracts artists, as it does in many of the locations in this homage to the cradle of notable classic faiths, cultures, and cuisines. I do miss Greek dancing and related dining. The ability to see whales from shore or deer in my small-city yard do offset that.

The Mediterranean is much larger than I had supposed. It would reach from nearly one end of the United States to the other, yet also spans so much more diversity.

While I’ve never been to the Mediterranean, much less Egypt, and never out of the country, for that matter, excepting pockets of Canada, all the same, I’ve flown places in my imagining, and some convey some underlying kinship.

Barcelona is one of those. Seemingly far out of my northern nature, this Latin complex of sensuality, color, and Roman Catholic devotion also harbors a stubborn independence, under its ostensible domination by others. Spanish, but not Spanish. Catholic, and yet in a historic realm of heretical lay movements. A passion for the musical dramas of Wagner, accompanied by industry.

Perhaps my genetic line does run, as a marker suggests, from northern England to the border of Spain. Uncork a red wine, then, and sit in my Smoking Garden on a summer late afternoon. Muse on a line from on friend or other while listening to an opera broadcast.

Consider Pharaoh’s descent, the ways the culture of ancient Egypt anchors one corner of the Mediterranean. Was there another anything like it, in its mindset or visual conception?

Or the pervasive smell of camels with their wave-like gait as they nearly sail from the southern shore of the Mediterranean and on deep into the interior of north Africa. In many ways, it’s their land more than man’s.

Or the continuing influence of Greece and its blinding sunlight, scented with lavender and sage, spills over the the culture we inhabit, sometimes with an air of longing

So much ancient history is filled with brutality and revenge, lusts and conquests. Especially, we would venture, around the Mediterranean and its sea.

The Italian Renaissance, with its lush reds and golden adornments, leaves its mark on the imagination. What would Europe be without it?

As for Minotaur in the Ring, with strokes of Picasso, don’t overlook Barcelona, the fifth most populous metropolitan area in the European Union. Some say the port city was founded by Hercules, which would fit its fierce spirit. It even lives its own language, despite Spanish rule. And then there’s its unique style.

They’re all energies in these poems.

You can obtain the collection in the ebook platform of your choice at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital bookstore retailers.

By the standards of many, I’ve been a prolific poet, though if you consider that just one new poem a week would come to more than three thousand now.

Sounds about right, even with the arduous revisions they underwent, pressing the original inspiration into something quite different, always in an “experimental” rather than traditional vein. Add in all the hours of submitting the results to journals and small press openings, and all the rejection slips that followed, it was an obsessive amount of time – I had been warned that even “successful” poets averaged 20 rejections for every published poem. And beyond that, simply preparing a “clean” page for those submissions back in the days of typewriters pressed the limits of patience.

Still, poetry could be done in shorter spurts than fiction in my free days and nights while I was engaged working fulltime in a newsroom. As a minus, it did divert my attention from the local news scene and related gossip, but it did sharpen my editing and writing skills, both of which chafed at the limitations of newspaper style.

Many of my early poems sprang from my journals, something that changed over the years, especially as I got into Deep Image and related techniques. While more than a thousand of my poems were published in journals around the globe, book-length collections remained elusive. Now, however, some are available as ebooks, allowing you a chance to sample my evolution over six decades.

Here’s a lineup:

American Olympus: This longpoem is also a mythopoem set in a single week of camping on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. The book came close to being published by a prestigious letterpress imprint but fate intervened, sending me spiraling back eastward. Many other nature and landscape poems reflecting my experiences from one end of the continent to the other and back in my early adult years await full collection. Please stay tuned for future appearances of those works.

Braided Double-Cross: Intense attraction, sexual ecstasy, and long-term dreams ignite this set of contemporary American love sonnets that reflect the conflicting emotions and unspoken expectations that surface in the eruption of breakdown and breakup. The set, my first run of poems composed as a series, explores passions that sugarcoat realities and betrayals. Sometimes something so truly hot leaves a lover branded for life.

Blue Rock: Continuing in the conflicted passions line, these poems reflect attraction, romance, and the aftermath in today’s society. Just groove to their beat.

Trumpet of the Coming Storm: Admittedly polemic, these are brimming with buried anger erupting at last. Sometimes you just can’t ignore politics, even in a historical perspective.

Hamlet, a Village of Gargoyles: This playful investigation of human identities alternates between gossipy and confessional, set within the context of close community. The collection now hits me as somehow prescient, considering that I’m now living in a real village with characters I hadn’t considered. The tone is contemporary with nods to Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Ebook formatting does limit the visual array of what you would otherwise find on a defined page of paper, but it does make my daring work available inexpensively around the world. I can live with that and so can you, especially if you’re reading on a smart phone.

I promise, there will be more.

You can find these in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. Or you can ask your local library to obtain them.