The fruit of years of a Daoist meditative practice, Mountains & the Sea approaches art-making in the Los Angeles community through the teaching of wu wei, meditative effortlessness and non-action. What could wu wei mean for poetry-making? The collection offers various answers, all of them rooted in my experience of more than five decades on the planet, age and its paths towards philosophy, the love of wisdom.

This book also brings to a culmination an argument, an inner argument, that I have been engaged with for decades, since college or perhaps even longer than that, an argument that runs through all the books in the Green Party sequence. That is my thoughtful refusal of communism. My commitment to Daoism here gives me the terms on which to bring this argument to a decisive close, one developed throughout the book and articulated finally in “Disappointing Marcin.”

The book closes with a section of “Early Poems,” which includes: “Threnody for Paul Morphy,” which can be found here; “A through G,” which can be found here.