City of Legends

Delivered Elric to his new college at University of Hawaii at Hilo, Dante leaves for Old Dominion University in two days.

Still haven’t finished release of "Selected Poems and Passions"…don’t have the emotional stamina for it, with all else that’s going on.

Survived my birthday on the 16th…hundreds of well wishers, which still was not sufficient to overcome my funk for my Sunday Girl being out of touch.  I admit, wounding…but one embraces what one can and accepts the rest.

I have been writing, sporadically, but some good material.  I need to find a way to decouple my creative/emotional energies from the roller coaster ride of my lovelife…

My front license plate was stolen, right off my car, inconvenient.

Just staying busy, as best I can…feeling in a bit of a holding pattern.  Why is it that whenever I fall into the horse lattitudes that random women come out of the woodwork, seeking a position as new muse? 

Oddly enough, professionally and personally I am doing well…just feeling unmotivated to blog.

Elric and Dante both leave this month for college…I, personally, will be escorting Elric to the University of Hawaii at Hilo for orientation.  Poor kid, trapped for 4 years in paradise.

Dante is gearing up for Old Dominion University, he is majoring in Math with a minor in Physics.  He is giddy over getting into a true academic environment.

My relationship with the Sunday Girl remains strong, if complicated…in time I will tell you the tale and you will go "Huh?"

The delay in final release of the last book ( Selected Poems and Passions: 2004-2011 ) seem to be resolved, and it should ship in the next few weeks…

I am letting you all in on my plan to, sometime this summer, retool "101 Great Love Poems" and either put out a similar volume, while dropping the original from my catalog, or re-issuing the book with completely reworked selection.

I have always felt the book was soft, more of a marketing experiment than a real attempt at putting out the truly great love poems.

My editor may like the idea.  Or she may kill me.  Or she may quit.  We’ll see.

But I am telling you all, first.

Oh, and it is not your imagination, I am cleaning up this massive blog…

The other day I was asked how many books I have had published and I had to guess.  I don’t think it is senility, yet, but just there’s been a few and some of them are far enough back that I forget them…so as much for my own edification as my audience’s…here’s the master list of my books

1.  PanthEon                                                        

ISBN #0-9659576-0-8

My first book, the Panther talked me into it as a predicate to my taking part in the Southern Poets’ Tour of 1996.  A lovely volume containing solid layout of about 70 of the poems from the Panther Cycles.  Out of print, but you can still find it in niche bookstores or occasionally on eBay.

3.  From an Unexpected Quarter                        

ISBN #0-5950023-1-5

Not really my second book, but this volume sucked up #2, "from out of the city", and added a hundred or more additional poems.  Despite some solid individual pieces, and the entirety of the Goldenheart Cycles, very uneven.  best know, perhaps, for the scandalous cover photo of my second wife, model Ann-Michelle.

4.  Love Gods of a Forgotten Religion                      

ISBN #0-5952225-2-8

The second book I did with Ann-Michelle gracing the cover, a stronger book overall that "from an unexpected quarter", some of my better work from that era.

5(a).  101 Great Love Poems (Hardbound)                

ISBN #0-5956540-2-9

My sole hardbound volume to date, a popular gift book, which is why I haven’t taken it out of circulation.  Truth be told, it’s several poems from the Panther Cycles, repackaged with a marketing-concept title.

5(b).  101 Great Love Poems (Softbound)                  

ISBN #0-5952588-2-4

The softbound edition of the book.

6.  INVOCATO                                                    

ISBN #1-4116293-1-0

My collection of some of my best works, not given the wide release of most of my other books, because I wanted to keep it to the hardcore fans.

7.  THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES                      

ISBN #1-4116379-4-1

All 640+ poems, with annotations and both cover and internal illustrations featuring goth model and recording artist Jillian Ann.  A massive book.

8.  The Morgantown Suite Poems                            

ISBN #1-4116337-4-1

Written over a period of several days to give my impressions of the West Virginia town where I spent my teen years.  Some lovely works.  Was disqualified from being used as a prize for a Poetry Out Loud competition because the subject matter of the poem "If your husband gets home".

9.  Ronin in the Temple Of Aphrodite                      

ISBN #978-1-4303042-5-8

A solid collection of muse-free romantic and erotic poems.  I took it out of circulation after the cover model decided she wanted to pick a fight with me, but plan to re-issue it with a new cover in the coming months(!).

10.  Psalms of the Monster River Cult                            

ISBN #978-1-4357072-8-3

Daniel S. McTaggart and I collaborated on this collection of poems about the Morgantown area, the people and culture.  It was fun and well worth the opportunity to work with my longtime poetic mountain poet friend.

11.  As such…                     

ISBN #978-1-4357144-8-9

During my very intense and public relationship with South African writer Candy Tothill, this volume, featuring her image on the cover and a foreword written by her, surfaced.  Intense, romantic, erotic and ultimately ironic as it debuted just days before she packed it in on the relationship.

12.  loveaddict                            

ISBN #978-0-5572839-0-3

Powerful, confessional and true.  The poetry of romantic obsession, of love, of lust of madness.  A very satisfying book to complete, although perhaps a bit inaccessible to my saner readers.

12.  Selected Poems and Passions:  2004-2011                           

ISBN #tbd

Going through a few last minute changes before it goes global, I would have to say this is my strongest book since "love gods…".  The last seven years of love, pain, madness and joy. 

Later this year, or maybe next, you get Apokalypsis, which will render these all moot.  I might even pull them all from publication.  I haven’t decided yet.

I try not to make promises I can’t keep, which is why I rarely trust editors or middle-men.  Tell me to write a sonnet in anapest hexameter about the mating life of ferrets in the next ten minutes?  Done.

Now, add to the equation any additional steps…like an editor (sorry, but it’s on my mind).  Suddenly they want to take it and check it…make a few suggestions (there has been one editor, one, in my life whose merest suggestion of a change in a poem did not result in a bloody jihad)…take it and tell me they’ll have it back to me in ten minutes.

Then, tomorrow, tell me they got distracted and had a few other things to do but they’ll have it for me very soon.

Deadline is already long blown.  What can you do?

In the case of "Selected Poems and Passion:  2004-2011", you wait.  I promise I had the manuscript ready and the draft books out by February 12th.  Really.  Now I am just waiting for the resolution of a final edit to turn the book around and have it out to the world.

I have to vent, but I have to admit, the work by my editor has been excellent and worth the wait.  So, we shall see if you all agree that this is the best book of mine, so far.  Because, if it is, it will have been worth the wait.

Like most things are, if you want them to be right.

am I finally making the crossover?  uncertain.  there are indications, based on my examination of my thought processes.

Interesting.  Have been writing fitfully.   Spending a tremendous amount of brain power trying to help White Sunday with some issues and projects.  When I sit back and look at the mass of my output over the last several weeks, even months, it is staggering.

Estimates place the current wordcount for the White Sunday poems at around 70,000 words.  That’s incredible, almost insane.

As soon as my editor completes the review of "Selected Poems and Passions:  2004-2011" I will lock in the ISBN and it will go live.  It is available now, if you know where to look, but wouldn’t you like a nice copy complete with ISBN and any final edits?

My moods are mercurial and intense.  I have been avoiding tampering with them, but may have to.

In the spirit of "Live at Kyrienar" from my first CD, I did this week’s podcast with a faux audience…slide to the right and pluck it off the podcast listing.  The selections are from my almost upon us book entitled

Selected Poems and Passions:  2004-2011

Many thanks to White Sunday, and others, for the inspiration.

It is the return of the "From Out of the City" podcast.

Featuring a funked up, cathedral organ pure testosterone and tears fueled delivery of "The Sacraments" from "Apokalypsis".

Well, what the hell are you waiting for?  Here’s the link:

From Out of the City for January 1, 2011

This Friday night, at approximately midnight, as the new year turns on the East Coast of the United States and the people closest to me are, for the most part. elsewhere, the "From Out of the City" podcast returns with something remarkable, "The Sacraments" from the forthcoming book Apokalypsis, perfromed with my band.

I just listened to the revised music, now I have to go back into the studio and tweak my vocals, as I need more from my voice.  The integrity of the original take is amazing, so powerful that the Sunday Girl herself refuses to listen to it.  I need more.  I need incandescence.  I need a religious fervor worthy of a Joan of Arc or a Saint Stephen.  I need to dig deep and release it all.

And I will.  The next three days are very important.  They are a time of great turmoil and pain in my life, or survival and passion and the last romantic verb.  And I don’t want all of you who have waited the last couple of years for the return of the podcast to be disappointed.  I don’t want to be disappointed, not by myself (I am disappointed enough in others, you know).

I’ll post the link once the podcast is up and you shall see, you shall hear, did I take it all the way?  Did the afterburners kick in and the last wisps of fire really press things as far as they can go?

Let’s find out what I have left, shall we?

A few months back the manuscript for my "next" book, Apokalypsis took a 176.25 degree turn when I decided to turn it into a full on love letter to the extraordinary woman I call "White Sunday".  No problem.

But then I kept writing more "White Sunday" poems and the book kept growing.  I asked a good friend, fellow poet Mary Katherine Brake, if she would be so kind as to take over the editing duties.  She agreed, but she also said that there was no logical end point for the book until either I stopped writing "White Sunday" poems (at this moment around two hundred and growing daily) or the relationship took such a dramatic turn that I had to change the muse’s "totem".

I agreed and handed off the project, realizing it could be months, even years, complicated by a complicated relationship the likes of which would make the most love-starved fan go "Phew!  I’m glad he’s not involved with me!"

So I decided I needed to do a different book in time for my Spring Tour.  Something different, something stunning.  Something so overladen with images and poetry that it would explode in your mind and eyes like artillery shells full of ecstasy and pain.  This was the book currently called "orphans", but it will undoubtably change names as now, thanks to the editorial tutelage of Ms. Brake, I have ample reason to postpone that book until mid-Summer 2011.  No problem.

I’ll do a third book, something powerful and romantic and poll my readers and find out…they want what?  Erotic?  Sheesh.  And at the very moment I am trying to demonstrate to that small piece of the universe that matters to me that I am not some overly-intense screaming Byronist.  Okay, I am, but I have other sides to me as well, really. 

Thus was born the need for a fourth book.  Something patoral, gentle, true but in the subtle whisper not the cataclysmic bombast.  I am right now working on the concept, but I think you will find it oddly refreshing.

So, here we go.  I was going to do a book in 2010.  Instead, no book in 2010.  Four books (maybe) in 2011.  Blame my editor.  I knew there was a reason I hated editors.

The good news?  I already have the covers to the first three designed. Really.  No, you can’t see them…yet.