Steve Brooks (Abhaya) – Poetry, Prose & Art

“The Ocean in a Bottle” is a small collection of poems that was my part of the poetry anthology “Five on the Western Edge,” from Momo’s Press (Stephen Vincent), published in ’77. Included in the anthology were myself (as Steve Brooks) Stephen Vincent, Hilton Obenzinger, Beau Beausoleil, and Larry Felson. It was Stephen’s idea that we, a diverse group of male poets, writing in the Seventies, would get together for a year before publication, talk, hash out, and mull over our various ways of living as writers in relationship with others and the world. It was a noble idea, but there wasn’t much open talk among us, as there might have been if Dr. Phil were present, but he wasn’t. Stephen wanted to call the book, “Five Disturbed Men,” but that was roundly rejected. Later, in my poetry satire, “The Blood and Turnips Poetry Festival”, I parodied that idea as “Five Disturbed Men on the Brink of Disaster.” I’ve reconnected with the others on facebook, but we are all as terse as ever in our non-confessional maleness. Poetry may be, as Stéphane Mallarmé, I think, once said, a way of saying what one has difficulty feeling, but open discourse is another matter, altogether.