Tony Mares 05/12/12
Recent photo: Tony Mares taken by daughter Vered Mares
Welcome to my home page.
I'm getting better at visiting my home page and I hope you will notice the changes as I go along. Much has happened in the last two years and I will continue to update this web page.. For the moment, I want to leave aside my books and writing projects to talk about writing itself. Why do I write? Why does anyone write?
Writing has never been a one-way avenue of communication for me. Rather, writing is my way of interacting with the world. From people I know and don't know but see on the streets, to the rapid fire changing vistas within me, everything feeds into my view of existence as I experience it. I want to give back to the world, via writing, what it has given me, both the good and the bad.
While sitting recently at a table in the Plaza del Sol, Madrid, a man, a Norwegian, I believe, asked what I did. I said I was a writer and he expressed a great interest and said that writing had helped him deal with important personal issues. When he asked me what I wrote, I said "primarily poetry." "Wow," he said. "Poetry, that's pretty hard core literature. Every word counts." I was very pleased with what he said.
Poetry, at least for me, IS hard core. It is an extremely efficient aesthetic vehicle for relating an inner vision to all objects of the world. For me, the varied ways I experience the world interact ceaselessly like the dance of matter and energy in all realms, visible and invisible. My world might be that of a hedgehog, very narrowly focused, capable of seeing only one truth, or it might be that of a fox, to borrow a couple of terms from Isaiah Berlin, encompassing many truths. In any case, I say to you the reader: "Hello out there. Here's what the world is like to me. How about you?" I share with Woody Guthrie the view that everyone in this world is connected and everything in this world counts. Like him, I value the lives of ordinary people who aren't ordinary at all. Like him, also, I loathe the very concept of a nation state. This is one planet we live on and we bring to it the variety of our individual, cultural, and linguistic experiences.
For you, the reader, I hope you will enjoy my work. Some of my poems are meant to be humorous, others deal with political and social issues, and still others simply relate to the many worlds I describe above that we all share. I want to entertain you, to enrage you, to make you reflect on our condition as arrogantly self-styled homo sapiens sapiens. If my poems even barely make you think about or reflect upon the stupid things we have done to ourselves over the last ten thousand years or so, then they will have succeeded as poems. Like the late Paul Shepard, I think we carry within ourselves the fire circle, the gathering point for sharing our stories, our poems, that point the way to the future.
In addition to poems of mine that have appeared in various reviews and anthologies, my two most recent books are ASTONISHING LIGHT: CONVERSATIONS I NEVER HAD WITH PATROCIÑO BARELA, University of New Mexico Press, 2010, and RÍO DEL CORAZÓN, Voices From The American Land, 2011.
I am at work now on a book of poems trying to relate today's world to certain events in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). You will be able to see in my poems, in this collection and elsewhere, that my politics are multicultural, left of center and close to the Anarchist tradition and philosophy. However, I know that all sides suffered in the Spanish Civil War; there were "good guys" on both sides and the "bad guys" were also everywhere. You will see I am no one's ideological prisoner. Unfortunately, the immense stupidity of right wing thought and actions in the United States today reminds me of the tragic right wing decisions that triggered the Spanish Civil War.
One other thing. Increasingly my work is in Spanish. So I say in English and Spanish to the reader wary of poetry: Try it. You might like it. ¡Hay que probarlo! Quizás entonces sí le gustará. Les convido a leer mi obra y compartir sus observaciones con los demás lectores.
Writing has never been a one-way avenue of communication for me. Rather, writing is my way of interacting with the world. From people I know and don't know but see on the streets, to the rapid fire changing vistas within me, everything feeds into my view of existence as I experience it. I want to give back to the world, via writing, what it has given me, both the good and the bad.
While sitting recently at a table in the Plaza del Sol, Madrid, a man, a Norwegian, I believe, asked what I did. I said I was a writer and he expressed a great interest and said that writing had helped him deal with important personal issues. When he asked me what I wrote, I said "primarily poetry." "Wow," he said. "Poetry, that's pretty hard core literature. Every word counts." I was very pleased with what he said.
Poetry, at least for me, IS hard core. It is an extremely efficient aesthetic vehicle for relating an inner vision to all objects of the world. For me, the varied ways I experience the world interact ceaselessly like the dance of matter and energy in all realms, visible and invisible. My world might be that of a hedgehog, very narrowly focused, capable of seeing only one truth, or it might be that of a fox, to borrow a couple of terms from Isaiah Berlin, encompassing many truths. In any case, I say to you the reader: "Hello out there. Here's what the world is like to me. How about you?" I share with Woody Guthrie the view that everyone in this world is connected and everything in this world counts. Like him, I value the lives of ordinary people who aren't ordinary at all. Like him, also, I loathe the very concept of a nation state. This is one planet we live on and we bring to it the variety of our individual, cultural, and linguistic experiences.
For you, the reader, I hope you will enjoy my work. Some of my poems are meant to be humorous, others deal with political and social issues, and still others simply relate to the many worlds I describe above that we all share. I want to entertain you, to enrage you, to make you reflect on our condition as arrogantly self-styled homo sapiens sapiens. If my poems even barely make you think about or reflect upon the stupid things we have done to ourselves over the last ten thousand years or so, then they will have succeeded as poems. Like the late Paul Shepard, I think we carry within ourselves the fire circle, the gathering point for sharing our stories, our poems, that point the way to the future.
In addition to poems of mine that have appeared in various reviews and anthologies, my two most recent books are ASTONISHING LIGHT: CONVERSATIONS I NEVER HAD WITH PATROCIÑO BARELA, University of New Mexico Press, 2010, and RÍO DEL CORAZÓN, Voices From The American Land, 2011.
I am at work now on a book of poems trying to relate today's world to certain events in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). You will be able to see in my poems, in this collection and elsewhere, that my politics are multicultural, left of center and close to the Anarchist tradition and philosophy. However, I know that all sides suffered in the Spanish Civil War; there were "good guys" on both sides and the "bad guys" were also everywhere. You will see I am no one's ideological prisoner. Unfortunately, the immense stupidity of right wing thought and actions in the United States today reminds me of the tragic right wing decisions that triggered the Spanish Civil War.
One other thing. Increasingly my work is in Spanish. So I say in English and Spanish to the reader wary of poetry: Try it. You might like it. ¡Hay que probarlo! Quizás entonces sí le gustará. Les convido a leer mi obra y compartir sus observaciones con los demás lectores.