In Disappearing Ink: Poems you can never find when you need them

Why This Book is Titled In Disappearing Ink. Little known poets are lucky to have an audience on open mic nights. On arrival we pencil our names at the bottom of a yellow pad. The featured poet reads first and then time allowing authors on the list head to the podium to pour out a poem and our hearts. Polite applause may follow. Theres a flicker in time after such a reading in the seconds it takes the poet to travel from the podium back to his or her seat when...kazaam...its as if the words of the poem vanish...are never heard again. A friend Tracy Hart compares it to Buddhists creating a mandala. They may labor in shifts for weeks moving grains of colored sand to craft magnificent art. But when finished they wipe the art away...a metaphor that nothing man-made lasts. That reality suggests the title: In Disappearing Ink and the subtitle poems you can never find when you need them. But it also brings to mind another human reality: the joy anyone who has ever written a poem knows - a pleasure arguably more immediate than writing in any other genre. Since so many try their hand at verse Im betting you know how good it feels when you replace an imperfect with a perfect word; and that sense of pleasure when a jarring phrase is improved by shifting its position in a stanza. Heres to every poets hours at the keyboard to the stanzas to the rhymes created to the contentment of making then sharing a poem.