Dan Hedges

Dan Hedges teaches English in the Sir Wilfred Laurier School Board of Quebec. He has also taught at Sedbergh School, and the Celtic International School. He studied English, History, and Education and Trent University and Queen’s University. He is the editor of HUMANIMALZ Literary Journal. His writing appears or is forthcoming in North American and International journals such as The Monarch Review, Kenning Journal, Wilderness House Literary Journal, Haggard and Halloo Publications, The Euonia Review, and more than sixty others. He has completed three poetry collections: Agrammatical Humanimalz (2011), Field Guide Aesthetics (Middle Island Press, 2012), and An Inflammation of Nouns (Middle Island Press, 2012).

From Middle Island Press:

An Inflammation of Nouns (2012)
ISBN 978-1-4675-4893-9
by Dan Hedges

(Available at Amazon.)

An Inflammation of Nouns contains 100 poetic statements that are “…intense, philosophical, hopeful, transpersonal, challenging, and Jungian” in nature. It is a sparkling 57-page compliment to Hedges’ Field Guide Aesthetics.

(A browse upon Pages 17 and 46…)

“Nothing At All or Something At Least”

It is usually existential, when faced with the
unbearable endeavour, to reconcile that
we are the possibility of ‘nothing at all’ within
a possibility that we are ‘something at least’.

“Start-Up Costs”

(when it comes
to typical
concerns about
time and
space,
the start-up
costs are
hard to
reconcile)

“Wild Grasses”

Wild grasses are utilitarian lines,
point A to point B survivalists;
the little cluster of love at the top
is a mess of revelry, for having
achieved
linear actualization.

“Logic and Beauty”

{symmetry
is
associated
with
beauty
and
everyone
knows
that
logic
is
beautiful}

“The God Metaphor”

{The God Metaphor
has a half-life of
two-hundred years
and from there
proceeds to
occupy an
infinite regress}

Field Guide Aesthetics (2012)
ISBN 978-1-4675-3919-7
by Dan Hedges

(Available at Amazon.)

Writer’s Statement: “I want to describe my writing as intense, philosophical, abstract, and hopeful. For me, poetry is a created texture, best experienced in the agrammatical mind. In my view, the crux of poetry has a lot to do with archetypes, and allowing mind-scapes to form beautifully, by force of words. Native American tradition and world-view has certainly affected my life and writing in a huge way, which often alludes to animal spirits colliding with ‘humanimal’ realities. I am intrigued by an aesthetic paradigm that I call ‘field guide aesthetics’ which attempts to reconcile new world nomenclature, with complex spirit worlds that span greater epochs.”

(A browse upon Pages 11 and 31…)

“Rubber Tomahawks”

Literary control mongers curtsy
to fractal derivatives of
‘art freedom’, and Xerox
field-guide aesthetics, to be
defended with rubber tomahawks.
These offed rheostats proceed to angle-find
America, with cheap geometry sets, to
diminish what’s sacred. To all of this,
we burn field-guide elegies
through the haunting tense,
sacrosanct forever.

“Semantic Smackdown”

Neo-Cliché-Hipsters side-step
(which is to say crab-step)
through karmic outcomes that
hinge on continuous reaction
to constant elegy,
in the haunting tense.
To reconcile urgent
metaphor with
semantic aspect
is to pull strength
to the center of
meditative judgment.
Semantic inner-explosions
squeeze massive and important epochs into
a momentary sense of
ultimate conundrum.

(Please consider leaving a kind review of Hedges’ books at Amazon or elsewhere.)