The Story of My Life

I was born in 1976 in Charleston, South Carolina and raised in North Carolina and Arkansas. After graduating in 1999 from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, with a Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction in Philosophy, I went through the usual poet’s formation: rejections from schools and journals, jobs as a burger flipper, coffee maker, garden nursery worker, dishwasher, and unemployed bohemian. Finally I moved to Germany in July of 2001 to marry my girlfriend, whom I had met over the Internet while a senior. I lived there for 2 ½ years, working as a dishwasher (yes, again), English tutor, and expatriate poet, Ezra Pound style.

Finally, in early 2003, I was admitted to the MA in English program at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. In the course of my career there I earned three scholarships, went to three conferences, and published my poems in dozens of journals. In December 2005, I graduated with a Masters in English. In January 2006, I became Adjunct Instructor of English at SHSU.

In August 2007, I started a doctoral program. In May 2010, I graduated with my PhD in Literature/Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS. I am currently looking for a job.

The Story of My Poetry

Some of my poetic influences:

Yosano Akiko, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska
 
It is very important to me that my poems have a strong rhythmic, musical flow. However, I do not achieve this flow through traditional English accentual-syllabic meter (if you find any iambic pentameter, it was an accident). I prefer instead alliteration, repetition, parallelism, various types of subtle rhyme, and in general as much vigorous diction and vivid imagery as I can manage. The bedrock of my style is the concrete visual image and its attendant metaphor and symbolism- my debts to Imagism, the Deep Image school, and Symbolism should be clear. I am also an avid reader of verse in Persian, Japanese and German- much of my image-style comes from haiku and tanka, my lyrical tongue from Rumi and Attar, and my mystical sensibilities from Rilke and Hesse. My poetry also contains holdovers from my days as a philosopher and activist. The last part of the equation of my style and influence is music: jazz, blues, and bluegrass most notably.