Once Upon a Time in Babylon

Once Upon a Time in Babylon is a miscellaneous collection of poems written (largely) in San Francisco over a thirty-year span beginning in 1980. These poems seek to transform daily experiences & observations into a music of the ordinary. Topics range from the intimacy of desire & estrangement to manifestations of the West Coast's continuous social & cultural experiment, & from the artificial splendor of human games to the self-evident immanence of the natural world. Following Buckminster Fuller's concept of the dodecahedron as the most resilient possible form, this music is usually arranged into structures of threes & fours: beats to lines; lines to stanzas; sections to whole aesthetic experiences. The book, in its entirety, documents the poet's San Francisco years to date, beginning with the novelty of a constrained Midwesterner transported into a land of infinite possibility, & proceeding through phases of increasing familiarity with the pulse & rhythm of America's most imaginary country.