About

Hello, thanks for stopping in at my blog. My name is Joe Clinkenbeard and I’m a 27 year-old resident of Portland, OR. During my average day I wear many hats: I’m a vegan, sustainability nerd, tutor, writer, editor, student, newshound, lover of philosophy and “radical pedestrian.”

This WordPress is a vehicle for my writing, both poetic and otherwise. Currently, I am holding off on posting whole poems until they’ve made the submission rounds, and am instead posting choice cuts of poems, excerpts of my reviews from Spectrum Culture and mini-essays/short treatises on various topics, with the hopes of expanding into other fields (see “Coming Up” below for more info).

My influences include the work of Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Auden, Dante, Rimbaud, e.e. cummings and Charles Bukowski. Other influences include the films of Godard and Kurosawa; the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and the Zen Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko, the wisdom of Taoist sage Chuang-Tse and the mystic Rumi; the novels of Nabokov, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon; the art of Klimt, O’Keefe, Hieronymous Bosch, Gustave Dore and Dali; the philosophers Heidegger, Camus, Russell, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Plato; and of course nature, the weather, place, built environments and cities (especially Portland), celestial bodies, ethics, social constructs, language, etc.

Thanks for reading and supporting my efforts to make a little sense of this world filled with so much absurdity and beauty.

Coming Up:

Video/audio performances of my poems, new and old.

Dates/information regarding readings and related poetry events.

More review excerpts from my work with Spectrum Culture.

Plans to write about urban planning and pedestrian advocacy issues as part of my “Joe Ped” project. Learn more at http://www.twitter.com/PedInPDX

Posting about my growing interest in social justice, food issues, eco- and sustainability matters, and the like.