Poems for the Ears

About the Book

Turning things upside down and inside out gets you different views of news, and of everything else. Inner space is vast and non-Euclidean-not just curved but full of clues and discontinuities. What we HEAR we normally process differently than what we READ. Spoken words do not so much carry meaning as intent. Nuances in the spoken word are social conventions. Written words have to carry meaning and can only project intent. They can’t get the close reading in print which they deserve. Poetry invades these nuances-connects the sound of the words to the pictures they evoke, even to their smells and feel.

Perhaps music-which often has no words-is the best metaphor for that space behind the eyes and between the ears. Poetry uses words to bridge that open space and to evoke and invoke the past, which the mind then links to the present experience. These poems are my overview of the great unexamined middle in your head and everywhere else. My intent is not to inform. Definitions sacrifice content by attempting precision. Logic and definition are often limits to comprehension-they need a GPS system to navigate.

For you epicurious we have here an epicurator to take you where even angels fear to tread. Nuanced reading on the enclosed CD’s give a depth unavailable to the print reader. Then you are doubly free to embellish these thoughts with your own notes on the page, follow the geocasher's ethic, and leave something more valuable than you take away.

About the Author

Howard now writes from Minneapolis, Minnesota, closer to his childhood home in Saskatchewan, Canada than he has been for decades. He graduated from The University of Saskatchewan with a BSA degree in agricultural economics, took a Masters degree at Oregon State College (now University) and studied at the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford University on an Elmhirst grant.

His career as an agricultural economist with the US Department of Agriculture brought him to live and work in Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and a two-year interlude with the Agency for International Development in La Paz, Bolivia. He followed this with two years as Latin American statistical advisor for The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, stationed in Mexico City where work took him to most countries in Latin America and to the Soviet Union and Rome.

Howard began writing poetry in grade school and resumed it after his marriage in 1951 to Grace Berger from Clarks, Oregon. Grace and their three children have predeceased him.

He produced many of these poems in retirement on the Calvert Cliffs on the Western Shore of Chesapeake Bay, and Yachats, on the Oregon Coast. A recent interlude in Manayunk, Pennsylvania enriched this experience.

Two chapbooks in prints of 200 copies were produced with the artistic collaboration of Karen Dale.

Decision Tree: twelve poems--1994, including reprinted here: “Wherever you go there you are”, Moonflies, High See, Moon Meanderings and Reflections—1994, 25 poems—including reprinted here: To Grace, You Here