I’ve added a lot of small projects and ways to find my work–ways I hope my work can be useful to you and perhaps help me to continue working and to support a family–especially in the past year. Here’s some information about my publications and projects in a single post (much of which can be found elsewhere on inkanblot.com):
Poetry Collections
The Clay Pot is the fourth small collection of poems I’ve put together. The first, Depth Perception, used a sonnet cycle I had just written as the organizing principle for a number of pieces ranging from juvenilia on up. One major reason for assembling that collection was to fix in place most of those works, so I could stop tinkering and reshuffling and move on to fresh compositions.
The next two, Unanswered Rhymes and Going Home Words, were assembled and published nearly together, but the bulk of Unanswered Rhymes is the fragment of narrative verse I call “the poetic Roland.” Both of these collections include poems from my graduate school years and my travels in Europe and Japan; as the title suggests, Going Home Words especially comprised these poems with a number of pieces that reflect on my re-adjustment after three years in Japan, my completion of the doctorate, and my first couple of years in the professorate. Most importantly, Going Home Words brackets my marriage and conversion to the Catholic faith, the significant moves and career changes that entailed, and the spiritual journey that drove me home in all these senses.
Each of these collections, then, in different ways, represented an end of one process of living and learning, and of development as a poet, while marking a new sense of what my “mature” poetic style should be. It is my hope that The Clay Pot is the best collection yet.
I have enjoyed using lulu.com services to publish these works. I also represent my work on Amazon, at goodreads, on my FB Author Page.
Inkandescence Products
One of the strongest reasons that “incandescence” merged with “inkan” to become my trademark is the power of luminous moments like sunrise, like encountering an ancient river in the middle of a busy city, like walking in the hills among fall foliage. My first art designs, and still my signature pieces, are scenes from my 2002 visit to Prague that capture all three. Over the past several years, I’ve carefully rolled out a selection of designs for postcards and mugs at zazzle.com. I have many more in the queue behind them.
I’ve organized my designs into three main categories:
- Inkandescence Abroad
features postcards from my travels, with related paper products. - Insert Coffee Here is a
line of mugs with various photographic, poetic, and travel themes. - finally, Mystic Haiku Mugs are a fun use of the “morphing mug” concept,
revealing an image of coffee and a haiku when the cup is full of hot liquid.
A few more bona fides
You can go to inkanblot.com/contact or just click on the card below to download a vcard: 