Words from the Brainpan

For a while now I've been looking for a good way of cataloging my library, which is well on its way over four hundred books these days. While there's something to be said for lists and alphabetical order there's times when I want to reshelve my books by genre, or by nationality, themes, or rating/review, which is why discovering Goodreads has been such an ingenious find, as it allows me to do all these things, combined with the functionality of a social networking site. And on top of that one can even submit one's own work and push yourself as an author. And since my small amount of published writing is self-published zines I decided to upload them in entirety for anyone to read, starting with my two poetry chapbooks: Invisible Neighborhoods and All Tonight's Adventures, as well as an interesting series of prose, Excerpts from the Back of the Skull.

Of course, both these books were written several years ago, and the process of uploading them was an interesting journey down memory lane, back to a time when I was much more of a naïve romantic, with tremendous amounts of hope for the world and for the power of language. Not that I am jaded now, but trying to take a much more mature position on my work and what is possible for me to achieve. But what was interesting was not going back to the memories of events surrounding my life at that point, but to the memory of actually writing the poems, with all the peculiar linguistic challenges that presented. As I am not a trained poet and have very little knowledge of verse, meter, etc, I was really approaching these books from somewhat of an outsider standpoint and essentially making up the rules for my poetry as I went along.

Hopefully I will be posting more of my recent work in the future, so stay tuned.