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Cleveland Poetry Scene, A Panarama & Anthology – cover by Jim Lang

april is poetry month thanks to T.S. Eliot, and it’s been a good month so far for creative recognition for me.

i’ve received my copy of Cleveland Poetry Scenes, A Panorama and Anthology. i’m one of 9 poets born in the 1940s to be included. they printed 3 of my poems, and Lady and I are both mentioned in half a dozen of the articles. book is available from Bottom Dog Press.

Cleveland Poetry Scene, A Panarama & Anthology – cover by Jim Lang

i had one of my fotos accepted as the cover art for Sara Holbrook’s new book coming out on Boyds Mills Press – actually getting paid for it. that makes photography, poetry, art, and publishing i’ve been paid other people’s money for so far. i took the foto inside the old walled city of Essaouira, Morocco, on the northwest coast of Africa.

the magazine Balanced Living is using both Lady’s and my art as illustrations in their next issue.

Jesus Crisis of TheCrisisChronicles.com blog is doing a blog on me in his poet series – i’ll be included with previous poets Alexander Pope, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, and Ferlinghetti. believe i’m the only Unknown Poet he’s using.

i’m near the end of our 14th edit of our bio of my bad-boy past – CRIMINAL by Smith & Lady. the book is 309 pages, 135,000 words, and covers the inglorious low-lights of my life from 1946 through 2005 when Lady and i decided to split the u.s.a.

folks wonder how two people (Lady & Smith) can write one autobiography. when Lady first moved in, i started telling her my stories. she wrote them down. then she started interviewing me for more stories. we took her interviews of me, my previously written true stories, plus other stuff she or i or others wrote and said, and combined them into a memoir we’ve been working on for the past 2 years.

the book was Lady’s idea. she’s the one who arranged all this mess into a more or less coherent chronological order. she wrote some of it, rewrote some of what i wrote, re-flowed the entire manuscript, and kept it going even when i believed there might not be enough interesting stuff there. it is my story with a bit of her and my story at the end, but it is spiritually her book.

and it is a good book – funny, fascinating, and outrageous. now we need to find a publisher. this is a major book, so we need a major publisher.

cover to upcoming book More Than Friends – background foto by smith