This little nook in wild Big Sur is filled with the freedom to create! I am honored to have had the opportunity to read some of my poetry there.
Check out me reading three of my selections starting at 6:27 on the video:
Down in the Dirt to Publish “Minority Vote” and “You Know One When You See One”
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.
Open Ceilings publishes King’s poem “Through The Glass, Clearly”
It is such a pleasure to have this wonderful night at the Monterey Symphony chronicled poetically. Check it out here!
Whistling Shade publishes King’s poetic epigraph “Unconfined” in The Love Issue.
pioneertown publishes King’s poem “After Burning The Wooden Sword To Ashes”.
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.
Delmarva Review republishes King’s poem “Tall Tales” in its online Spy series!
Whimperbang Publishes “The Nothing Behind Henry Miller Library’s Old Wooden Fence”
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/
Grit Bliss 18 Reading
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.