Feature: Doug Tanoury Day 5

Patron Saint

I found a wooden Santo in an antique shop,
Without hands and it called to mind a passage
From the New Testament,
Where Jesus encourages that offending eyes
Be plucked out and tempting hands
Be severed by their owners.

This Santo with tempting hands removed
And paint peeling from his clothes was
Keeping the company of sinners
Who owned the shop and other lesser Santos
With both hands still attached, so I asked:
“¿cuánto es este santo?”

The shop owner thought for a moment and
Slowly replied: “tres mil quinientos”.
I paused, then complained: “pero él no tiene las manos”
And I thought how much are a Saint’s hands worth
That have done such good work, and I said
To the shop keeper: “dos mil, no mas”.

So now “San Nolasmanos”
Keeps the company of a new
Even greater sinner, but for me
It remains an object of deep devotion,
A Santo with tempting hands removed
Is one that I can pray to.

© Doug Tanoury

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Q&A

Q: What is your writing process? Do you write every day?

A: I usually wake up quite early when the house is quiet and begin to write. I have been writing poetry with a computer since the mid-1980's. I have recently had a period of time when I was writing poetry every day. The creative process is wildly cyclical with periods of high and low productivity. I am currently on the upswing from a productivity standpoint and I am really happy about that. I have no idea how long that will last, but I am counting my blessings.

Q: Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

A: I often listen to baroque music when I write. I find that it inspires me and I think it finds is way into a poem by help shaping its tone. My favorites are Bach, Scarlatti, Telemann and Buxtehude. I love a good cantata and it helps me create.

Feature: Doug Tanoury Day 4

Breakfast at Banamex

Wearing a tight black dress and
Very high heels with sharp pointy toes,
The woman standing in line says: “Huevos Rancheros.”
The sounds the words make as she says them are sexy.

“The oven must be very hot,”
Says a woman in a white huipile
Standing behind her, “At least 500 degrees.”

“Celsius?” A man in a navy blue business suite standing
in front of the woman wearing the tight black dress and
Very high heels with sharp pointy toes asks,
And a woman in a grey dress standing in front of him
hisses “Idiot” and slaps him on his belly.
There is laughter up and down the line.

“You must use corn tortillas” a woman's voice says
From the front of the line.
She is out of sight
Near the bank tellers windows.

The line is long now and loops, twists and snakes
back upon itself and there is a man in a red guayabera
near the end of the line that is standing
Across from the woman wearing the tight black dress and
Very high heels with sharp pointy toes,
And he says, and it is not quite certain,
But he seems to be talking to someone
Who is not there or perhaps to himself:

“Breakfast is the saddest meal to eat alone.
It says so much about you, like your lover has left you.
You sleep alone at night. You have no one.”

The woman wearing the tight black dress and
Very high heels with sharp pointy toes looks at the floor and
Pretends she does not hear the man wearing the red guayabera.
The line falls silent and no one speaks.
A teller through a window calls,
“Next! Next please!

© Doug Tanoury

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Q&A

Q: What is one thing you want to be remembered for most as a writer/poet?

A: I just want my work to live beyond me. I want it to have a life of its own. I think that is what every poet wants. I have been writing long enough to have accumulated a large body of work and I have been fortunate enough to have a large percentage of it published, online and in print. I would like that process to continue. If for some reason, I cannot write poetry any more, I just want what I have already done to continue to published and read. That is the only legacy I hope for.

Q: When did you first have an interest in poetry?

A: I began writing poetry in grade school. I went to a small Catholic School in the inner city of Detroit. I found that reading and writing was a great way to escape. I always found poetry entertaining as a boy. I remember being enchanted by Edgar Allan Poe, John Masefield and Robert W. Service. These poets influenced me a great deal as a boy. I also remember my 7th grade poetry anthology entitled: Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. This book was delightful and I still remember many of the poems. This was my first interst in poetry as a boy. I began writing poetry seriously as an adult in my early 20's, so around the late 1970s I began to write and publish poetry. I was mentored and encouraged by a number of other poets and this helped me establish myself in this craft.

Feature: Doug Tanoury Day 3

Bell Tolls

The big bells of San Sebastian ring,
The first round are long gongs
That resonate in the morning air
And only with great reluctance
Do they slowly fall into full silence.

The small bells of San Sebastian ring,
The second round are short peals
Of high pitch, that cut the morning quiet
With excited and anxious rings
And quickly fade and evaporate.

The bells of San Sebastian ring,
Reminding me of the Mass I am missing,
The prayers not said, promises unkept,
And all the transgressions and sins
For which I have not sought
Full forgiveness.

© Doug Tanoury

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Q&A

Q: What are your goals as a writer/poet?

A: I have always held modest goals, first and foremost it was to write poetry. It is what I have always loved to do. Beyond that goal, everything else just isn't as important. A poet's first goal should be to write and in doing so hopefully takes some chances along the way. I think it is really quite simple. Poetry will not make you a commercial success or a household name and there is usually not much money involved in it. That has a positive effect, believe it or not, of keeping this art form pure and uncomplicated. This should be definitive proof that every downside has an upside.

Q: How do you know when a poem is complete and needs no more revisions or do your poems continually evolve and change?

A: I do very little revising of poems. I have always worked that way. When I have finished it, it is finished and I usually have resisted the urge to revise extensively. I have equally resisted editorial changes. Many editors have held out offers to publish a poem I had submitted, if I would change this or that. I have always told them that changes are not possible. I always felt such offers were fundamentally unfair, and I have always regarded them as an intrusion into my poems.

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San Sebastian sunset - Atardecer en Donosti - Bahía de La Concha

Feature: Doug Tanoury Day 2

Perfect Morning

It seemed like a perfect morning on the balcony of an apartment
In Achrafieh, against the crazy and irregular skyline
That is Beirut, where cable wires and television antennas
Slash and stab the placid clouds
That drift peacefully across the summer sky,
Chaos and disorder rule, and stand as proof
That the old Phoenician gods have dementia
And have sunk so far down into their geriatric funk
That they no longer care about anything.

In that perfect morning she stood there with me on the balcony,
The two of us leaning on the railing and looking out over
A drunken geometry and a cacophony of shape
That is the cockeyed landscape of East Beirut.
She standing in stark contrast
With both earrings and necklace
Color coordinated with blouse and skirt,
A picture of fashion and personal perfection,
The queen of everything in its place.

What I remember most of that morning,
Was how I blended so totally with the skyline,
How it embraced all my flaws and imperfections
Both great and small, my mismatched clothes
My unkempt hair, my slovenly habits and careless ways.
I became a part the cityscape that day,
High above the streets, in the choking fumes
From traffic below that formed a nimbus around me,
That celebrated and sanctified
My own inner disorder.

© Doug Tanoury

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Q&A

Q: How do you define poetry in general?

A: I wrote in a poem once that "Lust is to love, what poetry is to prose." I'd define poetry as literature that possesses a high level of emotional intensity that combines certain devices and techniques. It has a great deal in common with dreams. In fact metaphor, simile, irony, symbolism comprise a language that both dreamers and poet share. Everyone is a poet in so much as they dream. They create a rich world of color, fantasy, symbols and populate this nocturnal landscape with people, animals and spirits. There is something basic and primordial about dreams, and I think that poetry uses many primitive and instinctive modes of communications. I could talk about this for a long time, but I had better stop here.

Q: Tell us something about yourself that not many people know about you. :-)

A: I don't have any formal education or training as a poet, so I don't have an English degree, but rather a Business degree. I was not trained by academics, but by working poets. I was trained by other poets in writer colony and workshop fashion. I found this so rewarding and I have been lucky to have worked with some very talented and brilliant poets. I spent 10 years writing with the Macomb Fantasy Factory and another 10 years writing online with a group of international poets in a group I founded called Athens Avenue.

Feature: Doug Tanoury Day 1

Please welcome our first feature of 2010, Doug Tanoury!

BIO

Doug began writing and publishing poetry on the Internet in 1996. He founded Athens Avenue, a international group of Internet poets that write together and support each other in writer's colony fashion. Doug's work has been featured in the New York Times Online, Yahoo Internet Life, The Detroit News and the Detroit Metro Times. His publications credits include electronic as well as traditional ink and paper publications. Simply tying TANOURY into any Internet search engine returns results that reveal a large amount of Doug's recent electronic publications.

Doug is the founder of Funky Dog Publishing that specializes in poetry publication in both electronic and traditional media.. Funky Dog Publishing has published both electronic and paperbound poetry chapbooks. Doug's publication credits include Writer's Digest, Poetry Magazine, A Small Garlic Press, The Denver Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Zuzu's Petals, Pif Magazine, Plum Ruby Review as well as many others. Doug has published 17 electronic volumes of poetry that are featured on this site. He is currently working on two new collections of poetry that will be published next year.

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A Trick of Sophocles

She enters a play
Transcendent,
With robes flowing and
Swinging high above the action
Suspended by wires
And a swivel boom
Activated by a fulcrum,
A deus ex machina,
That stops dramatic progress
And the plot plodding toward
The dark and inevitable.

She descends from above,
From a painted backdrop
That is the sky high above the stage
To touch the hero
Who is plodding into
Truly tragic depth,
And by this godly entrance
Of divine intervention,
She extends one freckled hand,
To a mere mortal.

© Doug Tanoury