Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."--Henry Miller inThe Colossus of Maroussi

This book is an album, a journal, and a recollection. The idea was to travel around the world, meet poets, work on translations, and write poems. "My wife Margaret and I traveled approximately 34,229 miles by planes, trains, tuk-tuks, bemos, ferries, broken down Chinese night buses, and rickshaws." Along the way would be encounters with the Princess of Thailand, The Pink Man, Shilendra K. Singh in Kathmandu, fried grasshoppers, Tibetan monks in China cheating at cards, Tea House rappers, Xuan Xe of the Naxi Music Orchestra, the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, the mystic barber of Selcuk, Turkey, a sandlemaker poet in Greece, the Nubian Insect Poet of Tuscany, in Paris with George Whitman at Shakespeare & Company, a visit to Garcia Lorca's home and grave, Geraldo Rivera, and more! The stories are breezes over beers, swapped yarns, epiphanies, a jumble of thoughts, smells, kisses and bites. This isn't Basho's journey to the far north, this is Gary's stumble into the big picture, cracking out of the nutshell, hopping onto the blank page: the pen always moving to where poems actually happen. What results is a quirky look at the friendly camaraderie when poets from elsewhere meet poets of somewhere.