Michael (Dickel) Dekel Email & Phone Number

Poetry enchanted me.     Its interplay of sound and meaning in musical cadence (trans)formed me as I grew up, casting its spell on me ever since elementary school, when I wrote my first poems with “mud oozing up between my toes.” Word-play and sound-play danced in my dreams.     As I read more, the thrill grew. The music of Emily Dickinson and typography experiments of e e cummings excited my pre-adolescent mind—leading to a Jr High School poetry prize and later to international awards. In HS and later, reading Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Ann Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Sharon Olds, Joy Harjo and others, my perspectives shifted under my feet—a changing and expanding dance I constantly seek to capture in writing.     I never turned back, continuing to read, write, learn about, and eventually to teach poetry and edit poetry journals, constantly jazzed by this wizardry of sound and meaning.     With this magic of poetics, I cast sound, semantics, imagery, into the world with resonating poetry that responds to and expresses chaos as pattern and pattern as chaos. I explore broad themes from metaphysics to politics to relationships to witness through critical socio-cultural lenses and my own experience.     The poems connect to each other through semiotics, heuristics, and simulacra—which are embedded in or as imagery, form(lessness), and language play—through thema that flow into and through each other. At the core of my poetry are questions of epistemology, ontology, identity, memory, and loss.     Were Nietzsche to ask in a seance, I would say poetry comes from neither Apollo nor Dionysius alone or paired, but from what I can incorporate of art, music, philosophy, science, poetics, mysticisms, politics, history, fantasy—both in Dionysian orgy and Apollonian debate, with more performative expressions that multiply meanings.     These amorphous sources for my poetry form a symphony bordering on cacophony, shifting perspectives through a poetic range from free verse to lyric to experimental, often in hybrid, sometimes with a star-dust sprinkling of formal accent tones. Poetry enchanted me.     And under its spell I have written several published collections of poetry, one of flash fiction, and edit TheBeZine.com arts-literary-activist quarterly—still happily bewitched by language's soul, poetry. Visit IndieBound (https://bit.ly/3eWNQoQ) or Amazon (http://amzn.to/1TH3nVT) to buy my books.

Listed skills include Creative Writing, Editing, Literature, Teaching, and 46 others.