Wayne Paul Poetry

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

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Personal Info

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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Travel News

Some friends and I will be visiting San Francisco this weekend and attending the Cal vs. Michigan State football game. Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 02:10PM by

Wayne Paul |

Open Mike/Poetry Readings

Upcoming readings for those of you living in the San Diego area:

Say What ?, Every Wednesday, Filter's Coffee House, 4096 30th St. in North Park, 8:45-10:45.

Green Room, 2nd and 4th Mondays, Twiggs Bakery and Coffeehouse, 4590 Park Blvd. in University Heights, 8:00-10:00.

Drunk Poets Society, every Monday, Winston's Beach Club, 1921 Bacon St. in Ocean Beach, 5:30-8:00.

Vessel, 1st and 3rd Friday, Canvas Cafe, 1370 San Marcos Blvd. in San Marcos, 8:00, $3 cover

Open Mike, every Monday, Lestat's Coffeehouse, 3343 Adams Ave. in Normal Heights, 7:30-11:00/sign up at 6:00.

Poetry Bench, 1st Sunday, Quince Street at 6th Avenue in Balboa Park, noon.

Posted on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 11:53AM by

Wayne Paul |