Poetry

 This first book of poems by Carl Nelson delights in verbal play, rumination, assonance and dissonance, silliness and sadness, the comedy/drama of the small event, the inspired flight of thought, and topics of all sorts from Dumbo to Oscar Wilde.  What's a book for if not a place to fly poems like paper airplanes.  

 Poems that push the contrary.  Poems that vent.  Poems that stick their tongue out and don't wash their hands.  Poems that are critical.  Poems that eulogize Bukowski. Poems that embrace unpopular topics and thoughts.  Poems that embrace religion and bourgeoisie life and still enjoy small birds, kids, and dogs. 

 Poems taken from a current life of moseying around a small Ohio river town.​ 

Poems for every mood - born from the marriage of a poet and a business person: a  little romance, something about the kinfolk, some of Appalachia, a bit about sales, a lot more about poetry, and several methods by which all this is juggled within a marriage over the span of 30 years.  (Advisement: metaphors were used in the production of these poems.  A few may have been hurt.) 

"God puts treasure in earthen vessels." - R.R. Reno

A lot of garden fresh vegetables and brilliant sunshine were absorbed in the conceiving of these poems. Dogs were walked; neighbors chatted up. The only time politics intruded was when I opened my computer or read or watched the news. Generally, we grow our culture here, locally. The struggle is real.

Generally, whenever we purchase a complicated device, included in the packaging is a user’s manual. Usually, we don’t read it until after we have gotten stuck and tried every other sort of fix. Humans are delivered without a user’s manual (albeit the Bible). But, as just noted, how would it matter? 

In any event, the Self continues Assembling right up until death. So consider the following chapters and pages to be the User Manual for Carl Nelson, which include a Self-Assembly contents.  At this late of a date, you may not bother to read it. Or perhaps you will wait until my final utterance for purchase. Or, perhaps never. That is quite likely.

Oh well… It’s always the unspoken thought at any funeral as to whose loss it is. 

I used to say that as a playwright I was "trying to write a satisfactory conversation".  What I have found is that friends and others can also make an excellent poem.  You can handle them like dolls; place them here and there, pose them, and observe them from all sorts of perspectives.  And when they tell you something you didn't know, you're finished.  This works well in this volume for friends, others... even dogs.

"Imagine a 13-year-old Thai boy of 60 pounds suddenly adopted by a dad from across the seas who is five times his size and a poet. We made an odd pairing. 

At the time, we were each “aging out”, as the expression says. My wife and I were on the edge of being considered too old to adopt. While Tin Tin also was reaching the upper age limit for adoption - a few more years and he would have ‘graduated’ from the orphanage on his own. The irony is that he was to become a very precocious boy in a very late-blooming family." 

"What is a poem? Nowadays this question is near controversial as the question, “What is a woman?” Some would say a poem is determined by its genetic structure, whether the writing is metrical or the form predicated. Others would say (like Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland) that a poem is “whatever I say it is, neither more nor less”. I am not going to answer that riddle for you here. But I would like to let you know what I think a poem is - or rather the sort of art I am shooting for - in the bits of effort following. This only seems fair."