Wayne Paul Poetry

"In the absence of delusion there can be no creation."

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My influences are many and encompass all of the written arts. Included are those who are considered philosophers, dramatists, social or spiritual thinkers, critics, or essayists. I will try to do this with some semblence of chronological and historical order.

The writers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages who have influenced me: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Homer, Hesiod, Horace, Sappho, Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Aesop, Diogenes Laertes, Epicurus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Zeno, Plutarch, Livy, Seneca, St. Augustine, Lao-Tzu, Sun-Tzu, Avicenna, Li Po, Basho, Omar Khayyam, and al-Ghazali.

The writers of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods who have influenced me: Erasmus, More, Dante, Machiavelli, Malory, Ariosto, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Decartes, Dryden, Racine, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Herbert, Moliere, S. Johnson, la Fontaine, Ronsard, Pope, Goldsmith, Hobbes, Blake, Fuller, Austen, Scott, both Shelleys, both Brontes, Fichte, Cooper, Byron, Balzac, Coleridge, Keats, Dumas, Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Hegel, Carlyle, Voltaire, Stendhal, Locke, Goethe, Bentham, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Puskin, Poe, Kierkegaard, and Clausewitz.

(I'm aware of the historical overlap between some names of these two sections)

Writers of modern eras who have influenced me: Twain, Mill, Thoreau, Cabet, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Melville, Longfellow, Emerson, Bryant, Huxley, Sandburg, Apollinaire, Proust, Sinclair, Stoker, Tolstoy, Proudhon, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Wilde, Zola, Bakunin, Huysmans, Hugo, Nietzsche, Kipling, Kafka, Bulgakov, Dickens, Gilbran, Tennyson, Tagore, Joyce, de Touqueville, Marx, James, London, Pound, Russell, de Mauppassant, Chekhov, Shaw, Faulkner, Browning, Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Golding, Remarque, Frost, Kerouac, Bukowski, Tolkien, Valery, Ginsberg, Weil, Plath, Greene, Thompson, Hemmingway, Foucault, Solzhenyitsyn, Satre, Freud, Camus, and Jung.

A multitude of other individuals, including politicians, heads of state, military commanders, religious figures, scientists and explorers, reformers, outlaws and revolutionaries, musicians, painters, and journalists have influenced my writing and my worldviews but are too numerous to list here.

I was born a Gemini in Michigan in 1980. I've been writing poetry for more than a decade, and have been writing at a semi-professional level for about 3 years. I am fascinated with poetics of every theme, theory, species, and style. Metric and prose, terse and lengthy, the brooding and the absurd, the subtle and the explicit, all possess an artistic and expressive value to me. My work is an attempt at bringing these creative forces together to offer a bizarrely aesthetic experience for the reader, where thought and emotion intersect in the manifestion of the actualized subconscious.

In the paradise of the San Diego sun, where I've resided for nearly 5 years and have since been enthralled by the place, I am currently working on my second book of poetry and continuing my exploration of the written arts.

Blah

If you command wisely, you'll be obeyed cheerfully. Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

John McCain, the purported Republican "champion" of working-class conservative voters, owns 26 houses. He and his wife Cindy are worth about 300 million.

If any free-thinking American is still in denial about the connection between Big Oil, corporate corruption and the Republican Party, then I urge them to please browse the website www.mccainslobbyists.com to take an in-depth look at the members of McCain's staff and the web of people and funding that guarantees a continuation of Republican-CEO extortion at the pump if McCain and the War Party triumph in November. The once-touted McCain slogan of "campaign reform" seems to ring hollow here. And as far his so-called "energy plan" is widely laudeded as proving McCain's moderate stances, he recently skipped two important Senate bills for the Federal funding of solar and wind power development, and has repeatedly called for more drilling and oil development in the Gulf of Mexico. This farce of an energy policy typifies McCain's real political attitudes, which mirrors those of most pro-war Conservatives, toward environmental issues. Why does it always have to be facade and misinformation, instead of justice and progress, with these Republican puppets!

John McCain now has officially endorsed a timetable for Iraq troop withdrawal after years of calling any sort of phased exit "unacceptable". Congratulations Johnny! Way to "flip-flop" on a major issue that you were once defiantly inflexible on! Republican political maneuvering (or stumbling) at its finest! As U.S. and Iraqi leaders hammer out a timetable for troop withdrawal, it will be interesting to gauge the response from the American voter this November. Will anyone remember the "stay the course" slogan of the War Party, or that the Democrats actually called for a troop withdrawal as early as 2006? Now that the Republicans have adopted the idea of the withdrawal as their own, will the American people be able to recognize that this political ploy is just a voting tactic that the War Party will use to undercut Democratic foreign policy platforms for the Election? Hopefully, they will.

My socio-political conscious believes in the unrestricted freedom of information, the invigorating exchange of ideas, and the inalienability of open expression. The most beneficial, and successful, means to influence the mind of an individual and the heart of a nation is through discussion, debate, and stimulated intercouse, through the liberal and unforced advancement of an idea, through the presentation of a choice without falsity and threat. I believe this system of free expression to be the lifeblood of a healty democracy and the intellectual essence of a rational and progressive society.An important new site, www.foxattacks.com chronicles the slanderous, virulent, egregious Ah, the gears of the Republican-Fox media slander machine are grinding out yet another fear campaign of falsity, propoganda, and personal attacks!

I believe that the agenda adhered to by Republican Party during my lifetime (and before it) is one of social and intellectual regression, distraction, and division, greed, corruption, finger-pointing, chauvinism, xenophobia, misinformation, fanatical corporate and religious catering, anti-poor and anti-environmental platforms, recklessly pro-war and tyrannical foregin objectives, and illegal, manipulatory Executive mismanagment. Because Republican ideals are glaringly detrimental to the interests of freedom-loving, liberty-embracing, non-millionare Americans, I am not endorsing a member of said party.