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.

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Badass Archive

Maori Hau Hau

These badasses were a religo-military cult of warriors who fought the British on New Zealand's North Island during the third Taranaki War (1864-1872), also known as Titokowaru's War. They thought themselves immune to bullets, and waged a fanatically-brutal guerrilla campaign against the British military who sought to annex new territory at the corporate behest of the British East India Company. Led by the able Titokowaru, the Hau Hau won some important early vicories against the British forces commanded by Major Thomas McDonell. Their hit-and-run ambush tactics, combined with an uncanny knowledge of the forested terrain and a fanatically-devoted sense of invincibility, terrified and enraged British troops and, considering the desperate nature and longevity of the conflict, led to harsh reprisal and proportionately devastating losses for both sides. Eventually the British, led by the ruthless Col. George S. Whitmore, were able to weaken Hau Hau military resistance enough to secure an uneasy cessation of hostilities. The Third Taranaki War sputtered out in stalemate; the British did gain control large portions of traditional Maori land, largely because starvation and disease weakend the resistance of the native people, but the Maori did retain some semblance of cultural hegemony in an unconquered corner of North Island. The Maori Hau Hau, warring to defend their sacred homeland and proud identity against an invader, helped to check the imperial-expansionist objectives of the powerful British Empire and become absolute historic badasses.

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