Ceylon Moon is a reflective poetry collection exploring memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the search for meaning in a finite life. You organize the collection into five sections exploring childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, and aging. How did you decide on that structure?

I approach organizing how my poems are presented once I reach ~ 30 publishable poems. The organization is based largely on how the poems were written: as part of a project based on my interests, or those arising spontaneously based on an impression or mood. For example, in Ceylon Moon, the poems of “With [In] Sanity” and “The Voices” were projects in which the poems were created after months of study or observation. In contrast, the poems in “What The Night Holds” were more spontaneous in nature: triggered by an image, an idea floating through my mind, or my infatuation with another poet’s work. For example, “The Owl in Our Dreams” was prompted by Philip Lamantia’s enigmatic poem “The Owl.” When enough poems are written, they often coalesce around a common theme. When poems don’t fit into a specific theme, I categorize them under a vague title (eg., “Moods and Musings”).

Dreams are a recurring theme throughout the collection. How do your dreams influence your writing and understanding of yourself?

It’s important to understand that dreams emanate from the emotional (“mammalian”) centers of our brain (ie., the Limbic system). Our animal nature models our world and lets loose neural phantoms inside our mind. These phantoms speak through our higher (cerebral) functions of symbolism, language, vision, and explicit event memories. This is what stirs our sleep with important shards of meaning, as well as insights that evade our waking life. Such insights are not pronouncements about who we are. Rather, they reflect our unfiltered feelings, concerns, and struggles. And sometimes, they provide lucid insights into others we evade through rationalizations. Ones created to maintain a tenuous relationship.

I’ve studied my dreams for 40 years, and have come to know myself with greater clarity by doing so. I believe dreams and poetry travel the same pathways in the mind: one by night and the other by day.

Music, paintings, landscapes, and memories often intersect in your poems. How do different art forms influence your poetry?

Rhythm and flow are dominant in how I write poetry because I’ve been a drummer since I was 10 years old, and rhythm pervades my daily life. Poetry and song have had an intimate relationship since antiquity, and as a lifelong musician, that’s where I belong as a poet.

In terms of the visual arts, I’ve loved paintings since I was a child, implicitly recognizing them as W.H. Auden’s Secondary Worlds (our enchanted, sacred world of imagination). I began to notice the relationship between poetry and painting after years of discussing art with my friend, the artist Martha Diaz (who created the artwork for Ceylon Moon: Martha Diaz Fine Art).

Both painting and poetry attempt to induce a sense of immediacy for the experiencer. Both forms draw us into their world without necessarily understanding why. Only that their immediacy exudes something that is deliciously enticing, finally, it’s important to spend time with an image as well as a poem. To look at an image is an activity, rather than seeing (a physiological perception) and walking by. Similarly, glancing through a poem is like walking past a painting. We (including myself) need to spend time with a poem. Coming back to it again and again. Often there are layered meanings to be discovered and coveted.

If you could have readers carry one idea from Ceylon Moon into their own lives, what would it be?

I would simply say take to heart D.H. Lawrence’s observation: An act of pure attention brings its own answer. That has been the foundation of every poem in this collection. It’s how I struggle to evade my chattering mind. To dwell for a moment or two or four on all the beauty and richness of life that surrounds us and sometimes passes by¾like the smiling toddler without his stroller who turned around my hollow day (the poem “Becoming”).

Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon