Lineage

My formal engagement with poetry began in adolescence upon encountering Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Its syntactic sprawl, prophetic urgency, and unmediated candor disrupted my assumptions about poetic decorum. In Ginsberg, I discovered that poetry could function simultaneously as lament, indictment, and revelation. That encounter marked not merely inspiration, but initiation.

From that point forward, I approached poetry as sustained study rather than romantic impulse.

Walt Whitman’s expansive line and democratic poetics introduced me to scale—to the capaciousness of voice and the orchestration of catalog as both structure and ethos. Pablo Neruda’s lyricism revealed the convergence of eros, politics, and material reality, demonstrating how intimacy can operate within historical consciousness. Dylan Thomas sharpened my sensitivity to sonic density, incantatory rhythm, and the muscularity of language under pressure. Frank O’Hara’s immediacy foregrounded the poem as lived moment—an artifact of presence rather than retrospection. Charles Bukowski’s austerity stripped the lyric to its skeletal honesty, resisting ornament in favor of experiential directness. Kahlil Gibran’s prose-poetic meditations expanded my understanding of philosophical lyricism, while Mary Oliver’s disciplined attentiveness modeled restraint—an ethics of observation grounded in precision.

These writers constitute a lineage not of imitation, but of methodological influence.

I study their work architecturally: examining enjambment and caesura, tonal modulation, rhetorical escalation, and the interplay between confession and construction. I am attentive to how a poem sustains tension, how it manages silence, how it negotiates vulnerability without forfeiting craft. The objective is not homage but synthesis—an integration of intensity and discipline.

Storm of Ink emerges from this ongoing apprenticeship. It occupies the threshold between lyric immersion and structural awareness, seeking to reconcile emotional immediacy with formal control. My work situates itself within a continuum of poets who regard language not merely as expression, but as responsibility.

I remain committed to the rigor of the form—to reading closely, revising deliberately, and writing with the awareness that poetry participates in a tradition larger than the individual voice that carries it.

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