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Tom Ewart

Dan Lewis is a poet residing on the edge of the Patch Reservoir in Worcester, Massachusetts. While his true vocation is poetry, over the years he has made his living as a retail clerk, milk tester, wire stripper, fish cutter, librarian, typist, freelance editor, and technical writer. His life was changed in the early 1960’s when a high school friend introduced him to the music of Miles Davis. Although grade school run-ins with music lessons (first a squeaky violin and then a cantankerous clarinet) left him without a serious drive to make music of his own, music, and particularly jazz (and especially the bebop of the 50’s and 60’s) became a staple of daily life. In the late seventies he found himself living in Provincetown, where he created a weekly radio program, Wordscapes, in which he combined spoken word readings with music of all kinds. In recent years, he has sought to create a poetry that borrows heavily from the traditions of abstract art and improvisational music to transcend the ordinary referential limits of language.

Dan is the author of a full-length poetry collection, This Garden, published by Lulu.com, and a chapbook, Tickets for the Broken Year, published by Naissance Press. Lloyd Schwartz selected his poem, "Windraker" as winner of the 2012 Frank O'Hara Prize. His work has appeared in numerous journals.