Bøger af Wayne Pounds

Chronologically, these poems begin in my graduate school years, which started in 1967. The next year I went to the Vietnam war, came back in 1970, finishing in 1976. I took my first full-time teaching job in Algeria, found it not to my satisfaction, finishing my "year abroad" in Spain. In the Fall of 1977, I came back to KU and got a part-time post to hold me over until I could find another full-time position, this time in Japan. From Algeria, I brought back a long poem called "Constantine Journal" which later was on my website for some years. I've taken it down and print it here for the first time. By 1968, when I was twenty-two years old, I had begun to take to heart Rimbaud's drunken-boat instruction that the poet must derange his mind. It was time for me to begin, though I had no idea of beginning anything. It was all desperation. So many things had gone wrong and continued wrong. I was a miserable worm and believed I was damned. I couldn't get the story of love to go right. I took thorazine. I saw a psychologist once a week. I was in a state of depression, and the only dependable medication I found for it was alcohol. Thus, "Kaw fished the innumerable river." The poems reflect none of the good times that were part of graduate-school life.This is largely deliberate, for I believed then that poetry was a way of dealing with misery, and that happiness did not call for expression in verse. I even thought that melancholy was the more important emotion. After all, darkness identified and defined me, whereas sunshine did not. In long retrospect, I would now call the melancholy reflected in my verse of this period the struggles of a much delayed adolescence. I was Esau. I'd "sold my birthright / for this mess of learning."

An updated, second edition of a history of a farm family in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, 1891-1941. Regional history, county history, family history, genealogy. Index includes 165 family names. It appears here with its companion volume, Oklahoma Elegies: Chronicles and Family History for a combined price of $18.91--1891, the year of the Land Run.

As the subtitle says, this is a new Spoon River for the year 2020. It was Masters' gift to stumble on the idea of bringing "The Greek Anthology" back to life in the rural America of the first decade of the twentieth century. My own idea was to extend Masters' and create a Spoon River for the year 2020 in another part of rural America, namely Oklahoma. Though my book follows Masters' --chronologically it comes a century later--it doesn't follow it in any other way. My burials come from the years 1891-1912, mostly from Wright Cemetery in Chandler Oklahoma.

The fourth and final volume of my collected poems, covering the years 2014-2018. These were years I was living and teaching in Tokyo. My feet continue to circumambulate Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park, but my thoughts go back over a lifetime, the first 30 years of which were spent in the U.S.A. "Poets at Seven" sees collecting roadside beer bottles through the lens of Rimbaud. The last poem looks ahead into blue mountains. Meanwhile, the turtle crosses the highway.

"By the Rivers of Edo" calls to mind the Rivers of Babylon in the Psalms. Old Edo too was crisscrossed by rivers, moats and canals, laid out in a regular grid, a network much more organized than the narrow wandering streets. The best means of transportation was by boat. Edo was often referred to as the "Venice of the East." In these poems, "rivers" serves as a metaphor for memory and imagination. This second volume follows my pedagogical peregrinations first to Osaka Japan, then to Austin Texas, then to Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo. Poems are from my first three published volumes: Following the Serpent (1984), Proletarian Life (1987), and San Luis Obispo Sundeck Afternoons & Other Disasters (1989)

A book of poems, set in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, that draws on family history and historical chronicles. This is a companion volume to North of Deep Fork: A Lincoln County Farm Family in Hard Times, 1891-1941. The price of the two books together comes to $18.91, which is also the year of the Land Run.

Though this is a metafiction, the Autobiography is factual in detail, following closely the life of its subject, a farm woman born in Iowa in 1862 who bore and reared 11 children, homesteaded with her husband William Earp in Nebraska and Oklahoma, and died in Oklahoma in 1961 at the age of 98. A woman of deep piety, she belonged first to the United Brethren and then to the Church of God. She blames herself for sinful pride in that she kept one of her grandsons and reared him herself instead of allowing his biological father and his step-mother to rear him. She believes this sin cast a long shadow on her life and the grandson's. Now, sixty years after her death, she finds herself to be a photon of light in the Goldilocks Zone, which is not what she expected after death. She wonders if it may not be a kind of purgatory that she has to suffer for her sin. Perhaps the act of writing her life story may be a form of atonement.

These are 49 improvisations from the ancient Chinese poet Han-Shan (aka Cold Mountain) in his new home in Ueno Park, Tokyo, where he has taken up spiritual residence on an island (聖天島) in Shinobazu Pond. In recognition of his new abode Han-Shan has stopped calling himself Cold Mountain. He is now No Mountain. As a man free of spiritual conceit, he discusses Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. He talks about the pond and his island and also comments on current topics-- corporate disasters from the large like the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and Prime Minister Abe to the small like Tokyo's Drunk Poets. Ueno Wayne, as the present writer styles himself, is Han Shan's amanuensis. He listens and transcribes. That's it folks!

Poems from Tokyo's Ueno Park and its temple complex, Ground Zero for the Fire Bombing of Tokyo by the US Army Air Forces in March of 1945. The toll of the dead reached 100,000, outnumbering the immediate tolls of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The pond itself, Shobazu Pond, survived, as it has survived all other local events since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The poem that remembers the bombing is called "In the Season when the Dead Return." It doesn't mention the catastrophe itself. Of course not. It's a poem. The book ends with a coda mocking official Japanese attitudes toward the Fukushima tsunami and attendant nuclear disaster. The poem is called "The Wisdom of Monju" and Youtube has a video of my reading it at Infinity Books in Asakusa.

Though the Colony of Massachusetts convicted Thomas Pound of piracy, he was no pirate but a loyal servant of Sir Edmund Andros and the deposed Catholic king James II. This is the thread of fact to guide the reader through the labyrinthine maze of colonial politics. This matter take up chapters 1-2 of the book, while the later two chapters are devoted to Pound's family and genealogy, subjects that no one has written about before. Given the fact that Pound's nautical adventures took place in the vicinity of Nantucket, it is no surprise that Herman Melville figures largely in these pages.

An Account of the Peregrinations of an Ordinary Farm Family (the northern branch of the Virginia line of the Pound/s family) Following the Westward Movement from Virginia to Kansas with a Glimpse of Oklahoma Territory and with Literary-Historical Side Trails Along the Way, Including Hints for the Writer of a Family History. This work was updated in 2016. I revised the history of the centenarian patriarch Samuel Pounds, and I added a section on the mulatto Poundses of Halifax County VA. The update can be found at http: //www.ueno-wayne.org/2018/03/correction-and-addendum-to-fate-of-bones.html

This is a book of stories--more precisely, documented narratives--about the lives of lawmen. One of my primary sources has been the Indian-Pioneer Papers put together by the WPA in the late 1930s. Almost every story makes some reference to this gold mine of folk voices. This source is color blind and supplies wonderful material about blacks and Indians of the old days.