LITTLE ALLITERATIONS, by Charles Tarlton

Poetry, chapbook, 16 pages, from Bottlecap Features. This is a series of short poems exploring the relation of sound to sense in free verse, mostly written on my back porch overlooking the marsh and Long Island Sound. The subjects are ordinary, in one sense, but as they are made to yield up sounds and rhythms lurking in the language, they take on a patina of oddity. The poems mean to search for the formal in the deliberately informal, to round a bend in the road where we meet an unexpected meaning in a familiar word, just slightly bent or out of place. Charles Tarlton’s favorite poets (whose influence dances atop almost every word) are Wallace Stevens and Ezra  Pound. Tarlton has more than once been heard to remark – “We are not done with Modernism yet.” Charles Tarlton is a retired university professor of politics who has been writing poetry full time since retiring in 2006. He lives on the Connecticut shore with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and their two standard poodles, Nikki and Jesse.