PRE - POST 
POETRY

A Poetic Intelligence
Human perceptions and vulnerable associations fill the poems of Poet Caló whether his verse comes with meter or with rhythm.

Chapbook Hells Psychological Thought
This famous poet's attitude facilitates poetic satire at a picaresque pace, with his most steadfast beliefs always subject to poetic scrutiny and his greatest wonder, do you hell as he?

Losing Contact
Human sensibility includes the fear of synchronicity. Read Caló.

Reality Remains
Jung psychology enlightens the spiritual and metaphysical with as much rigor as Caló blurs philosophy and philosophical thought with a loving disdain for such tenets.

                           
 - The Blogging Of Zolen Caló -
 A Poet's Self-Critique 

         I think I have a problem. A serious problem. Honest to God. I say it's about this anthology of poems; my wife says it's about me:
         It is about this: I have always loved poetry. I always wanted to be a poet. I never looked down on the profession just because of Edgar Guest or ee cummings. And I remained determined to write even when my father told me that all poets were faggots, and my mother wailed that, though my father was wrong to call every poet a queer, they were certainly all atheists, and alcoholics, too.
         Because of the wisdom imparted to me by my parents, I never dared tell a soul of my poetic ambition. Outside of school, I never read a single poem nor owned a single poetry book. If you found me in a book store, I can assure you it would be nowhere near the poetry racks.
         Thus, as a miserable isolate did I begin to file little bits of poem in a folder I kept in a series of bottom desk drawers. I tracked my life with those poems for a long while, so long that the folder got cumbersome and stuff started falling out.
         I bought a computer to format the poems and sort them by topic. Shortly afterward, the miracle occurred. I looked down one day at about three-hundred pages of neatly printed blocks of short sentences handsomely decorated by a bunch of white space, and said to myself: "By God, this looks like a book!" And yes, my ego won over me. I came out of the closet.
         I drove to the city, strode boldly into a book store, and purchased twelve books of poetry written by the most bastardized surnames I could find¾which is to say, the most revered of the world's contemporary poets. I also tuned my car radio to National Public Radio and left it on when voices¾trained, I think, through self-stimulating conversations with oneself over long Minnesota winters¾Aspartamed the air with verse.
         And yes, I read all the books, and I listened to all the voices; every book, every recitation, hour after hour, day after day until . . . .
         You guessed it. I overdosed. I went into treatment. And I came to know the piteous error of my ways.
         I wallowed in self-contempt for a while. Then I moved to rue. Then I just felt lost. I watched Planet Of The Apes videos. Somehow they made me feel at home with the world of modern poem . . . and I was not even one of the apes.
         But that small solace did not last. I called myself contrary, insolent, even aesthetically illiterate. I tried again to read the poets, to re-read, to open to new horizons of meaning and metaphor, rhythm, meter, beat, shades of sound and tone and verbal textures, to senses of height, depth, color, liquidity¾oh so many of which qualities so perfectly illuminated the insides and undersides of things only a roach, worm, or amoeba might normally enjoy. And, most impressively, all alliterated as predictably as a consonant pinned beneath the cat’s paw on my computer keyboard.
         I could take it no more! In desperation, I went philosophical. I told myself: So much better not to know so much than to know so much that is so gauche.
         I reasoned Buddhistically: Once the old monk attains the pinnacle of the mountain of knowledge, he is only expected to come back down and join the multitudes in the marketplace¾not substitute himself for a paddle in a Los Angeles sewage aeration pond.
         I decided to clean myself up. I threw out all of my chapbooks of contemporary poem. Then I threw out all my modern poetry books. I threw out all of my literature books, too. I went so far as to write 'Emily Dickinson sux' on the bathroom stall of the convenience store down the street. I even etched my ex-wife's phone number next to it as if mathematics, after all, might prove reality.
         But in my ears continued to ring alliterations. I wondered if Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane gone mad had been reborn¾one in each of my auditory canals. I planned trips to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana State Universities to implode with my mental illness among the poets confined there.
         Instead, I wound up at the local sushi bar. After a few slimy selections of sushi flipped succinctly past my fatally languished tongue, I found myself at practice with the popular FISH methodology of modern verse¾whereby an intensely alliterating S carries the mantric beauty of the poem as an H dovetails to assure the listener of the sweet passivity of the author; this while a carefully controlled F dots the metric landscape with a passion the equivalent of a dead flounder falling out of a tree.
         To say the least, my poetic license with the FISH methodology did not work for any of my bar companions any more than it has ever worked for me, although I would guess that most academics in the field of modern poetry might defend it as sensually gratifying and pregnant with possibility, though carrying a potential for limpness when handled by the premature.
         And speaking of limp, that's how I find myself today. I've written a truck load of poems only to learn that I don’t write like a real poet should. I get angry sometimes and make the words I write yell out. And I know I'm a little rough with feminine portrayals because nobody ever told me how to do it, and all the women I ever dated¾until I got married¾were absolute nymphomaniacs. I don't recall using words like dermatologist or photocopier in my verse, either, although I won't say I might never use meteorological for some sly reason. And . . . Oh, God! I just remembered! I don't have a style. I hardly recognize myself from poem to poem. And I'm especially embarrassed by the senseless short ones; and by the fat ones that I can't remember what they mean.
         So with these apologies having finally driven me to my point, it is this: I have written my life for you, fair reader. Yes, you¾not me. And for a mere pittance of consideration, I would ask you, from my anthology, to pick out just one of my chapbooks¾one, the title of which sets a little flight to your fancy, or dares you a little bit, or that you think a little wacky¾and read it. Then, what the hell, if it doesn’t suit you, and if you haven't bent the pages up too much with your anguish or soiled them with your tears, give it to a friend as a present.
         There. You have it. Dare to try one. And remember, if you don’t enjoy it, don't blame yourself for wasting perfectly good money on a poetry book. Blame me. And at the worst, make a friend happy this Christmas.