Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets

This book is an album, a diary, and a recollection. The idea was to travel around the world, meet poets, work on translation and write poems. Along the way are encounters with the Princess of Thailand, The Pink Man, fired grasshoppers, Tibetan monks in China cheating a cards, Tea House rappers, Xuan Xe of the Naxi Music Orchestra, the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, the mystic barber of Selcuk in Turkey, a sandal-maker poet in Greece, the Nubian Insect Poetry of Tuscany, in Paris with George Whitman at Shakespeare and 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. 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.