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Rhythm and Flow
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”).
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What the Night Brings are a series of poems delving into the nature and vagaries of our dreams. The many unsettled aspects of dreaming is extended into the next section “With Insanity” (or “Within Sanity”) explores” the near thin edge” that separates our uncomfortable ideas about what actually constitutes sanity, insanity, and what lies in between.
The Voices are six Rilkean poems in which Gedaliah assumes the personas of non-sentient nature (eg. clouds, mountains, trees, etc.) to explore what it is that resonates within us that draws us to them. The collection closes with All That is Worn and Torn (from the last poem in Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus) explores the inevitable decline and closing of our own life and what solace and wisdom we might take away at the end.
The series of poems rises above the fear and despair it describes to reach for a higher position or acceptance, gratitude and love for the journey we’ve taken. Even for those who believe (like the author himself) that there is nothing more than what we hold no longer. The poetry of Ceylon Moon is consistent with his previous books in that they confront the darkness and chaos but do not wallow in despair, but shines a light upon all that makes life worthwhile that is found in the closing poems Because My Time is Limited and What is Life?
Water Your Flowers With Love: A Collection of Poems
Water Your Flowers With Love is a poetry collection that moves through grief, memory, exile, tenderness, and moral urgency without ever letting go of its faith in love as a sustaining force. Across poems about childhood, a lost father, immigration, war, kindness, and the consolations of the natural world, Author Koula Hadjitooulou keeps returning to one central conviction: the human spirit is fragile, but it isn’t finished. The book’s title poem crystallizes that vision by turning childhood harm into an aching plea for gentleness, while poems like “Cyprus and the Girl with the Water Jug,” “Warrior of Life,” and “Three Little Birds” widen the emotional field into displacement, survival, and the cost of violence borne by children.
What stayed with me most was the book’s emotional sincerity. This is not guarded poetry. Hadjitooulou writes as someone who means every line, and that directness gives the collection its pulse. The poems about her father especially landed hard for me. In “I Can Still Feel His Warmth” and “Letter to My Dad,” the grief isn’t abstract or ornamental. It feels authentic, almost tactile, as though memory itself were giving off heat. I also found myself moved by the recurring image-world of flowers, stars, hills, wind, and birds. In another writer’s hands, that language might feel overly sweet, but here it often works because it comes from a genuine instinct toward repair. Even when the book turns toward atrocity and abandonment, it keeps searching for what she calls “pockets of light,” and I admired that refusal to surrender to bitterness.
What I appreciated about the collection is also where I felt its limits. The writing is strongest when Hadjitooulou anchors her hopeful, exhortatory style in a specific story or image, as she does with the child carrying a water jug in a refugee camp, the young girl forced into marriage in “She Was Only Fifteen,” or the immigrant soul suspended between two worlds. In those pieces, the poems gather weight and texture. Elsewhere, the book leans on affirmation, repetition, and uplift. The ideas are earnest and relatable, sometimes beautifully so. What I felt was a writer trying, again and again, to make compassion usable. And in a collection so preoccupied with survival, resilience, and the moral necessity of tenderness, the insistence itself becomes part of the art.
Water Your Flowers With Love gave me the feeling that I had spent time with a voice shaped by hurt, gratitude, and an almost stubborn belief in mercy. I’d recommend it to readers who like accessible, heartfelt poetry, especially those drawn to poems about healing, family, displacement, inner strength, and the attempt to keep faith even when the world makes that difficult.
Pages: 160 | ASIN : B0G4F2K2TC
Unconventional Narrative
All Told gathers a lifetime of poems shaped by place, memory, travel, politics, and aging, offering a wide-ranging portrait of one life lived across the American South, distant countries, and the quiet rooms where reflection settles in. Did you view the book as a kind of life story while putting it together?
Yes, in a sense, it’s a life story, or at least a story of my last 55 or so years on Earth. I think of it, along with Rites of Passage, as a personal legacy created from a large backlog of work reaching back to the 1970s. It’s a compendium of my poetry that I would like to live on after me, even if it lacks a wide circulation and serves only as a means of preserving a significant amount of my work for anyone who enjoys reading poetry and might find it interesting. It also gave me an excuse to dig through the whole body of unpublished work I’d saved over the years and organize it in a way that I felt would be aesthetically pleasing and offer its readers a perspective on my life and my struggle to create a sort of unconventional narrative that would reflect the changes in my life and my development as a poet.
Your poems often use plain, conversational language. Why does that style appeal to you?
I think the sort of plainspoken style of much of my work came about firstly through the influence of such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, H.D., e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and the post- modernists, especially those in the New York School — O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Ignatow, et al. — who were attempting to break away from strictly metrical verse and traditional forms and appeal to readers who were highly literate but not necessarily steeped in literary history or the kind of verse taught in most university English courses back then. On the contrary, I followed many other poets of the time in taking the lead of Ezra Pound, who, around the beginning of the last century, envisioned a new style of writing that “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power… I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.” Secondly, when I moved to Türkiye in 1993, I soon discovered a school of poetry that illustrated this modernist dictum in the movement called “The First New,” headed by Orhan Veli Kanık, who dreamed of writing a poetry so stripped down that it even “dumped words.” This movement arose most significantly as a result of the change of the Turkish script from Arabic characters to the romanized alphabet most commonly used in Europe and the Americas. It also brought European influences into the sphere of Turkish writing, with translations by Veli and other poets of foreign poetry, such as that of the Surrealists. Along with my reading of 20th-Century Turkish poetry that followed The First New, I became aware of the provincial nature of American poetry, which showed little influence of Surrealism and other important developments in Europe that had strongly influenced contemporary Turkish poets. So my view of modern poetry changed radically after I moved to Türkiye, and my own writing began to reflect this change as well. I was elated when the poet Güven Turan, who edited my bilingual collection Galata’dan: the View from Galata, noted on its back cover that I was really as much an Istanbul poet as Orhan Veli, even though I wrote my poems in English. This direct, conversational style of writing came to define my own work, even as I tried to incorporate other aspects of modernism and postmodernism into the poetry I was writing then.
Many poems reflect on aging and reflection. How has your perspective changed over time?
I’ve tended to measure the course of my life in phases. This can be seen as well in the course of my poetic experience, wherein the dominant “themes” change from one phase to the next. For example, in my twenties the principal idea that directed my writing was that of a “Muse,” gleaned largely from the writings of Robert Graves, and this idea changed, or evolved, into a Jungian vision of psychic forces that replaced the Muse figure with a spiritual “you” that for several years animated my poems and infused them with a “meaning.” Other phases reflected my discovery of Taoism and Sufism, philosophies whose main principles I’ve adopted and tried to apply to all aspects of my life. I found that I could trace the movement of my life through these phases that have determined the nature of my development as a human being and writer. I can’t clearly articulate the phase I’m in now except to say that it seems to concern my present role as an elder in my “tribe” and involves a further consolidation of the ideas and experience that form the basis of the ongoing questioning and quests in my work and life.
Looking back over this collection, what surprises you most about your own journey?
I’m newly surprised almost every day by my incredible luck at being who I am and to have survived and, for the most part, enjoyed my life’s journey up to this point. I think the poems in All Told express this feeling in both direct and indirect ways. I’m not religious in a conventional sense, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve somehow been guided and protected by forces that exist somewhere beyond my individual perception or understanding.
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Genetic Testing
The Killing Gene follows a genetic research team as they discover the gene pattern they believe is linked to violent tendencies and serial killers. Where did the idea for this book come from?
My niece was getting IVF, and I overheard that she had selected certain characteristics, eye, hair, skin, and educational background. Then I recalled my son’s genetic testing for Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis, and it made me think about the pro-life/pro-choice issue. I wondered–and it’s in no way related to my niece’s child–after seeing parents being taken to court for the crimes their sons committed in a school shooting. What if there is a serial killer gene that is passed along to the children, which is triggered, apart from the nature vs. nurture theory?
Can you share a little about the research process required to put this book together?
First, I had to find other illnesses found in genes that are passed from grandparents, skip a generation, and affect the grandchild. I finally found a disease like cancer that affects the whole family or a gender only. I did not want to write a science book, but I had to mention basic genetic testing and technology like CRISPR that can identify genes and order.
Many characters are described as relatable and even flawed. Was that intentional to mirror the complexity of the book’s central question?
Yes, I went with the simple answer with triggers to activate the “killing gene,” a violent sexual act towards the grandfather, Malcom Lynn. The lead geneticist, Tatiana Mirzo, also had a sexual trigger that is kept silent but shows up during the act. The journalist, Maggie Rally, had old-school determination and limited time to solve the murders and was not afraid of getting too close.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Yes, I have a new book, and I have about 90% done, but I had an accident and have trouble typing fast enough to finish. The new book is called The Suicide Council, inspired by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I always wanted to know why, especially when the victim does not leave a note. So this is a fantasy, I do not know if it is classified as a thriller because it involves a Spiritual Council of saints and prophets who visit the victims just before they commit the action. They record why, but they have rules. They cannot change their mind because of free will. And close ones can find out why it happened only when they reach heaven. They can look up the files of the victim’s life filed by the Suicide Council. So I have a collection of stories about victims, different situations, and characters.
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From current choices for parents to make about what their babies will look like. In the near future, parents will be able to find a gene that will show a psychopathic tendency leading to violence. The parents will be able to decide on the birth of a child with Down syndrome. With characters involved with the geneticist’s background and suspecting colleagues, and a report that connects the dots on an ongoing Serial killer investigation with the help of the Main geneticist
Poetry Thrives on a Mystery
What We Hold No Longer is a collection of poems that circle around memory, aging, identity, and the haunting void that lies beneath it all. What inspired you to write this particular collection of poems?
I’ve recently become an avid reader of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Last year, one of his books introduced me to Jacques Lacan. Specifically, how our subconscious impacts language, and in turn, how we use language shapes desire. For a poet, what could be more delicious to explore? Ineluctably, even mentioning Lacan brings up his theories on the Void (The Thing) and religion. This, in turn, led me to Lacanian scholar Richard Boothby (Embracing the Void). Along the way, I also read a book by Phillips on our ambivalence towards transforming our lives (On Wanting to Change). Transformation is a particularly important topic at this stage of my life. What I did not anticipate in reading this book was the evocation of so many memories. As a pediatric psychoanalyst, Phillip’s description of childhood, particularly the excruciating years of adolescence, flooded me with things I’d long forgotten (eg, seeing my grandfather’s corpse at age 9, the inchoate sense of frustration, and seeking revenge on my parents’ reputation with a can of red spray paint, etc.).
Can you share a bit about your writing process? Do you have any rituals or routines when writing poetry?
I’m trying to understand my writing behavior. I appear to have a natural rhythm, whereby I’ll write a dozen poems over a month or two and then go silent for just as long. During the quiet months, I read more and pay attention to what I see and listen to: all the things popping up as thoughts and feelings. The poems “The False God’s Lullaby” and “New Year’s Day” were brief glimpses of people, just a few moments of an image that resonated deeply, and unexpectedly.
What moves me from outside triggers something poignant nesting deep inside: “The I of my other who moves silently with me” (The False God’s Lullaby). Also, I love editing. Paul Valéry once said: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I think he meant you can always refine and improve a poem. I try to limit my revision window to six months. Once a poem reaches structural stability (ie, I know what I want to say and the confines to say it in), I put it away for several days or weeks at a time. It’s important to understand that during initial composition, the poem’s neural map is being built using high stores of neurotransmitters. This is how we learn. However, it also prevents us from seeing inherent weaknesses when we’re still trying to get our thoughts written down. Taking a break for days or weeks reduces neurotransmitter stores. This removes the blinders to our writing, so we can see problems more readily and find better ways to say what we’re trying to convey.
How do you approach writing about deeply personal or emotional topics?
I think it is important during initial composition to just let things rip, because that is likely to be the most truthful. However, there is a balance to be struck. I’m reminded of a phrase from the Upanishads: “The path to salvation is narrow. It is as difficult to tread as the razor’s edge.” I view confessional poetry as an attempt to achieve psychic salvation. To shy away from powerful emotions creates a sense of falsity impossible to ignore. Yet, in the passion of writing, we can also say too much. Poetry thrives on a mystery, on what is left unsaid. That’s part of the art form I’m still working on improving.
How has this poetry book changed you as a writer, or what did you learn about yourself through writing it?
I have the sense in writing What We Hold No Longer that I’m beginning to mature as a poet. I’m not sure anyone else would agree. But there was something about the Lacanian cycle of poems that shifted my writing in a way I haven’t fully grasped. At this moment, I can’t imagine writing anything more profound or better composed than those poems. Time will tell. Every book I’ve written so far has enriched my sense of self and given me a sense of being more at peace with myself. Something that had eluded me before I’d written The False God’s Lullaby.
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Such topics have been the foundation of his poetry explored in his previous works and have been expanded upon in “What We Hold No Longer.” As in his other works, poems are grouped together in themes. These themes approached from a deeply psychic perspective and include: personal transformations throughout life, existential encounters with “Nothingness,” the rise of fascism, loss, and the realm of an interior life (both our conscious narratives and our river of unconsciousness). What Gedaliah refers to as “the I of my other, who moves silently with me” (The False God’s Lullaby).
The poems in this current collection maintain characteristics that reviewers of his previous works have consistently noted. That “Gedaliah seamlessly blends philosophical depth with artistic expression, offering a deeply reflective journey through identity and human complexity, striking a perfect balance intellectual exploration and emotional resonance.”
A Means of Self-Healing
The False God’s Lullaby is a collection of poetry and prose that explores the beauty and tragedy of the human experience, taking readers on a journey through your memories and emotions using in-depth imagery. Why was this an important collection for you to publish?
I’m entering the last phase of my productive life when I’ve found myself having reached the end of so many other journeys. Although I’ve been writing poetry since 1990 (when I first became interested in it), it wasn’t until I had reached an existential nadir so-to-speak in June of 2023. New poems just seemed to flow out of me, and so I went back to edit others I’d written over the years that I thought were suitable for publication. Something (more accurately someone) inside me desired to speak. It’s the time in our life when we wish to leave something that might survive our absence.
Were there any poems that were particularly difficult to write? If so, why?
If you’re asking, “Was it difficult for me to expose my inner life?” the answer is no. I began writing poetry after my profound experiences at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I’ve viewed my poetry as a means of self-healing (if you’ll excuse my use of a rather tedious California cliche).
How do you know when a poem is truly finished?
That is an interesting process question. It’s a matter of reaching a nodal point of comfortable satisfaction. This generally occurs within a week or so when the nagging feelings cease (eg. “Something’s not working but I can’t figure out what it is yet.”). Afterward, there’s a period of minor word-smithing that goes on for months. But finally, I have to tell myself to stop. There’s a point when “fine polishing” begins to weaken the poem’s impact.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’m already deep into investigating and writing my third collection of poetry (and perhaps some prose) focused on the works of Jacques Lacan and others on topics such as the connection between nothingness and spirituality and transformation. It’s largely a continuation of my interests in the multiplicity of selfhood. The working title is The Shadowed Crossing from a stanza in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
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The poetry is presented by topics that move like moods. The collection begins with contemplations of what the author calls “interior worlds.” This comprises over half of the poems and are the first and last titled sections. Interior worlds are expressed in such poems as “Memory,” “Confluence,” and “Longing.” This is followed by “Closeness and Distance” with poems describing experiences of both sexual (“Absolution”) and emotional intimacy (“Endearment”), as well as withdrawal (“Disillusionment”). The mid-topic sections move into the darker subjects of mortality (“Wandering,” “Big Sur”) and despair (“Awaiting the Pandemic”). Pulling back from these dark explorations are the poems found in “Lightness of Being.” These range from metaphorically comedic sexuality (“The Drummer’s Advice”) to a gathering with friends (“Friday Dinner”). “Interiors Worlds” are returned to with a prolific, seven-part poem exploring the external and internal aspects of familiarity (“Home”) and ends with the poem from which the book is named (“The False God’s Lullaby”). The final section is a small collection of prose pieces that add context to many of the poems. It also ends with a work from which the title poem was created.
Two major themes form the basis of internal worlds. First is the notion expressed by Lou Andreas-Salome’ of primitive consciousness arising in-utero. The poet fuses this with Soren Kierkegaard’s notion that we internally possess a sense of “the eternal.” The second theme ponders the implications of evolutionary neurobiology: that we are largely governed by the ancient powers of our animal brain (eg. “Limbic, paralimbic structures”). What Freud called “The It.” These are explored in the poems “Confluence,” “The Ancient Within,” and “Otherness.”
Despite the deep, dark themes of life that pervade many of these works, the author endeavors to find for himself and his readers how these encounters unavoidably lead to a sense of endearment and gratitude for life itself. In this, the author reveals the influence of his most beloved poet, Rainer Maria Rilke; for whom the poem “Wandering Rainer” was written.
Believing in My Dreams
In The Many Colors of My Heart, you share with readers a collection of poems focused on life’s ups and downs and the power of love. Why was this an important collection for you to share?
Basically, The Many Colors of My Heart, is the story of my life. And, as with any life, there have been struggles, and when emotions are at their peak, I don’t just write because I want to, I write because I need to. Some of the poems are about my wife, Nancy, and how she has the unique ability to pull me from the depths of despair. But I’m not always looking within, In “A Grandfather’s Lullaby,” I put myself in my father’s shoes, who at 83, has the struggles of old age. “Never Time Enough” is how he must’ve felt when my mother was at death’s door, and “Time Stands Still” is her looking down from Heaven.
A couple of the poems stem from the romance novel Nancy and I wrote. A few are pure fantasy: “He Loved Only Once.” I wrote “The King Comes Crashing Down” after we lost everything. And finally, towards the end of the book, I wrote to myself that no matter how hopeless it sometimes seems, somehow it’s all going to work out as long as I keep believing in my dreams.
Do you have a favorite selection that you find resonates with you?
“A Million Miles Away” is me telling myself and my wife that although it seems we’ll never get there, as long as we don’t give up, we will. I also like “He Loved Only Once,” because it’s pure fantasy.
What is the one thing you hope readers will take away from your book?
Whether it is love you’re looking for, or a dream of a better life you’re chasing, it can be yours, as long as you keep believing.
Can fans expect more from you soon? What are you currently working on?
My wife and I have just published a wonderful romance novel titled, Timeless Pages. Timeless Pages is available on Amazon and wherever else books are sold. We will also be converting it to a screenplay, and with any luck, you’ll be able to see it in theaters in a couple of years. I also wrote the cover song that goes with it. Coincidentally, it is also called Timeless Pages. It is the perfect companion book for The Many Colors of My Heart. Parts of some of the poems appear in the novel, and some of the poems were derived directly from the novel. Timeless Pages is set in the 1950’s; the story centers around a young woman named Diana as she struggles with saying goodbye to her childhood sweetheart, Michael, as he goes off to fight in the Korean War.
Michael asks, ”Will you wait for me, my love?”
“I will wait for you, I promise,” Diana says.
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