If you want info about me and my history, you are invited to visit transformercator.com. Yes, I am transformercator and an interesting story lies behind that name. You will find that story in a little as-ter-risk link on that site. I have also epiphanied as Solderman, he who makes it work, Tenacityman, he with the Nietschean will to hold out until it is done. Transformercator is a master of transfer and optimization of function. Owwwwwhhhh!!!
Much of my poetry is in the archives of The Poetry Page - poetry archive or on the current presentation of The Poetry Page - ourSLO.com/poetrypage. People are often confused and puzzled with me as a poet. I am just as likely to render a free verse poem loaded with devices as I am a rhyme stuffed rap with a trip hop background. I love rhetorical devices and rhetorical devices love me. That last sentence was an example of chiasmus. The absolute best rhetoric site is
The Forest of Rhetoric. Careful, you can lose yourself in that forest.
Yes, I write books. Yes I produce audios and videos. Yes, I run WinWardWays Publishing. Yes, I host, design, build, maintain, and write for websites. Yes, one of the websites I host and maintain is Bullhorn Collective. Watch for its new design coming soon. Yes, I think the publishing industry is a dinosaurus monolythus retained by silly people whose idea of salvation is seeing their name in print matter that becomes tomorrow's fish wrap. Why is soft copy better than hardcopy? Well, if you have to ask. OK, try this. You can resize soft copy, change text color, background color, font face, scroll it, go over and lie down on the sofa and read it from across the room. No book to hold. No words to lose in the center slit of the book, hands free. You can text to speech a book quickly, convert it to mp3, stick it in your mp3 player and go sit on the beach and let technology read you a book.
And Yesssss!! I am a poet in the ------well, let me just pull two excerpts from Poet's Corner of the SLO New Times for October 28, 2005 and then some quotes from others but let me interstice them with some fun audio stuff. Hey, in the immortal words of Dr. Hook, "stop crying, here, put a quarter in the juke box."
Rape of Truth
In that poem I used background music from Wax Poetic's Nublu Sessions. They areeeee the hottest thing in my Rhapsody library. I could have mixed that sound pretty well myself but they saved me the trouble. I am not trying to rip them off. I use them to promote them. You have to admit - they sound pretty good behind me.
In his poem "What If Poetry Is God's Work?" Taalam Acey says:
"In this now
when politicians and clergy
have proved themselves unworthy
of your time and
televisions shows and
music videos have proved unworthy
of your mind
don't be surprised to find that
god is especially present
in poetry dens
using poetry pens"
Cayucos in the Morning May
Deborah Tobolah says:
"The art of poetry has nothing to do with making a living; it has do with making a soul and making the world soul larger. It’s a calling and an answering. The poet is a poet no matter where he finds himself, no matter what befalls him."
Vocabulary
In my view here is what a poet is not. One who limits himself or one who limits what poetry is. They are usually one and the same. The hiphopper or triphopper or rapper may despise cloistered circle jerking modernist mfa type. The modernest may think of performance poets as (pejoratively) people who rhyme. If vocalized the word rhyme will be made to sound like a Spanish shepherd saying "mierde" and people who are too loud and toooooooooooooooooooooooo accessible.
Ivan Vazov (1884) says:
"A tight and chiming string
that resounds to anything—
a single stroke or evil blow—
always by the same rondo."
My People Are Poets
Kierkegaard says:
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris' bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; Which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful. And the critics join them, saying: well done, thus must it be according to the laws of aesthetics. Why, to be sure, a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips. Behold, therefore would I rather be a swineherd on Amager, and be understood by the swine than a poet, and misunderstood by men. "
Sailing Alone Around the Room with Billy Collins
T.R. Hummer says:
"What does poetry do, people sometimes ask, exasperated, it seems, by what they have read or what they have not read; what good is poetry if it has so small an audience? What good is your pituitary gland, I am prone to answer, and can you say that at this moment you are aware of it? Do you even know what it does? Are you even sure you have one? For the culture, I am convinced, poetry functions on that level; for the engaged individual reader, its work is something else: an electrification, a reminder that there are real mysteries left. For the poet, it is a pure obsession, a sequence of questions which have no answers, of demands that have no satisfaction other than the satisfaction of obsession itself."
Saxophone Jones
OK I have to admit something is in what Scoplaw says:
"When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
I keep hearing tree talk water words and I keep knowing what they mean. (Lucille Clifton)
I gave up on new poetry thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. (Russell Baker)
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. (T. S. Eliot)
All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. (John Fowles)
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Robert Frost)
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. (Robert Frost)
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. (Marianne Moore)
Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule,
That every poet is a fool
But you yourself may serve to show it
That every fool is not a poet.
(Alexander Pope)
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. (Carl Sandburg)
My poems mean what people take them to mean. (Paul Valery)
Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. (Kilgore Trout)
