Contributor’s Note by David Spicer

Jack Doe, known as the Unknown Poet, has had poems published in over 50,403 poetry journals, online sites, e-zines, and newspapers—almost every one of them insignificant, irrelevant, and inconsequential. They are his prized possessions that he has crammed on bookcases around the perimeter of his poet-cave. He also has had four sonnet-sestinas published in The New Yorker and seventy limericks in Poetry. Flunking out of junior high, he hitchhiked to California and hunted down Ferlinghetti, Corso, DiPrima, Wakoski, Bukowski, and the entire stable of Black Sparrow Poets. There he fetched buckets of beer for Mr. Bukowski at poetry readings, who dubbed him “my little shitbird.” After this apprenticeship, he refused a scholarship from Iowa, the premier writing factory and finishing school for snot-poets who collect daggers, stilettos, and switchblades for their careers’ arsenals. He has written almost 700 books and chapbooks, is known as the male Lyn Lifshin, and has retired to his poet-cave in the Okey Dokey Swamp in the Everglades, where he is the proud owner of a throne composed of the melted faux-gold of his nine hundred awards and trophies; on that throne, just above the spot on which his big head rests, is a plaque with his most famous haiku: Better are sour grapes/than an empty wine bottle/or no grapes at all.

David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Santa Clara Review, The Ginger Collect, Yellow Mama,Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, his latest chapbook being From the Limbs of a Pear Tree (Flutter Press).