“But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.”
--Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”
Ears On Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets
by Gary Mex Glazner
La Alameda Press (Albuquerque, New Mexico), 2002
list price $14
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Gary Mex Glazner ran a flower shop in San Francisco before trading it for a back-pack and a wandering poet’s life. His poetry is reflective of this. People buy flowers because they want to do something nice for somebody else. This is a lot of positive energy.
A good florist -- and a good poet -- will take such energy and give it back to the patron. And florists are privy to the personal slices of life -- more so even than priests -- from sickness to love, weddings to apologies, birth to death. Such training has attuned Glazner to arrange life’s blossoms into bouquets of prose.
Poets write to educate, to entertain, to explain, or create a mood. Glazner’s prose does all this and more. He may write about the torture of political prisoners or dismemberment by wild dogs, but he reduces the horror with humor. He may relate adventures with dishonest monks and drunken, lying poets, but he always twists an O. Henry ending into each literary ikebana.
In Ears On Fire Glazner takes the reader from the flesh of a jackfruit to the mountains of Nepal. His poetry encompasses the coasts of the Pacific to a drop of tea. The book is a journey from the atom to the infinite, and back again.
In Greece, Glazner meets Stavros Melissinos, the sandal maker poet, cobbler for Sophia Loren and the Beatles. In Katmandu, he walks with Chhistibung Bung, and learns from the world’s fastest performance poet. The message he gets from the Princess of Bangkok, though perplexing, inspires him to write another essay.
Prague, Hanoi, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Copenhagen... no place is safe from Glazner’s eye, or pen. His images of people and places in a world of poets provide more than snapshot essays. This photograph album of the printed word contains candid close-ups and panoramic prints of every poet’s dream journey. Ears on Fire is a road worth traveling and a book worth reading.
~Sandy de Nimes
