These poems are indeed earthy with dissent against injustice and in championing a poet’s freedom. They have found a fitting home Down in the Dirt! Stay tuned for their publication.
It is such a pleasure to have this wonderful night at the Monterey Symphony chronicled poetically. Check it out here!
I finished my latest novel and wrote this poem in honor of it. Check it out: https://www.pioneertownlit.com/king-grossman. Much gratitude on the folks at pioneertown for giving my work readership.
Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California is one of those rare places that invites original expression with the fierce kindness of strikingly honest and beautiful and experimental art. It is a favorite haunt of mine. A thin place, somehow close to the source. This is why I’m delighted that whimperbang published this poem inspired by my time at the library. Check it out: http://whimperbang.com/issue-26/king-grossman/
This is a swath of eighteen poems selected from my Grit Bliss collection, which I’m delighted to say has been compared by a past editor-in-chief of The Paris Review to the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Le Fleurs du mal, not as much for its subject matter as for breadth of scope, all the while weaving threads that harmonize what it means to be a human being, and one operating in the world. I see the collection as making friends with my shadow by way of first meeting as enemies who marginally respected and greatly feared each other. In this way, like Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Grit Bliss walks through the devil on out into Rumi’s field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. Major influences on my poetry are W.S. Merwin, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, and at the top of my list sits Wendell Berry, of whose work I read one poem each morning.
On this the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union way too close to starting a nuclear war, it was great being in the street in Salinas, California outside of our Congressperson, Jimmy Panetta’s office. I participated in the protest with the Peace Coalition of Monterey County, Veterans for Peace Chapter 46, and the Defuse Nuclear War coalition. Once again we find ourselves needing to bring a call for sensible and strong leadership when we are way too close to being in a nuclear war.
