MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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In my capacity as a D-list writer, people sometimes mail me books of poetry.  I don’t always know why this happens.  Usually there is some form of an advance warning, like, “Heads up!  I’m gonna send you the first English translation of the works of the twentieth-century Chuvash national poet!”  On the other hand, I recently received, out of the clear blue sky, with no note or anything, a fiftieth anniversary edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind—I am still confused about this, but of course very grateful. 

Well, a couple of months ago I got an email from a certain Preeti Majumdar, suggesting that I might enjoy a book called Kamal: Book One: “a novel in verse of five cantos, in structured, mostly iambic tetrameter or pentameter rhyme, totaling 5,472 lines,” written by a New Zealand poet called Zireaux, and edited by “Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., New York City.”  (You can read an excerpt here.)

The Turkish people have a very wise saying: “Free vinegar is sweeter than honey.”  In fact it is very rare that I say “no” to free anything.  So I sent along my mailing address, and it was a matter of time before I received the volume in question, generously shrink-wrapped in some 300 layers of shrink wrap, which I eventually penetrated in order to reveal an interesting cover illustration, depicting what appears to be some kind of human piano-hammer (right).

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