There”s a lot that I could say about Tony Brown, the writer of this week”s featured poetry blog, Zero Point Zero, a weekly column featured at GotPoetry. He has been reading his poetry at venues around the country for over twenty years. His poems have been published in more places than I can easily list, he”s won the Worcester County Poetry Association contest (1994), placed second in the Pawtucket Arts Council”s poetry contest (1990), and placed second in Worcester Magazine”s annual poetry contest (1996). He was a member of the 1999 Worcester slam team, and one of the poets chosen for the SlamAmerica bus tour in 2000. His poetry is thoughtful, wry, biting, intelligent, thought-provoking, sometimes hilarious and often breathtaking. His voice – and the voice of his poems – are unmistakable. Words like sonorous and mellifluous do not do it justice. It is the kind of voice that stops you in your tracks and holds you spellbound. He could recite the phone book and hold a room enthralled. And were he reading this, he would be blushing at the praise.

At Zero Point Zero, Brown engages in a different kind of writing. The weekly column focuses on the art and mechanics of writing poetry – something that far too many poets gloss over. In a recent column, he says,

One of the down sides of the modern poetry explosion is that people have, in the rush to express themselves, lost sight of the fact that those techniques of alliteration, metaphor, and all the rest are used precisely to enhance that personal expression — in other words, to ensure that the craft of the poem enhances the voice of the poem. … Anyone who thinks a real poet is a warm and fuzzy, vague communicator is missing something; most of us work very hard to be razor sharp in our work.

This is not to say that the writing is dry or academic. One week he may discuss the uses of metaphor and simile in poetry, the next how to (and how not to) write a political poem. Among the topics he”s touched on in his columns: the voice of the poet vs. the voice of the poem, truth and fiction in poetry, how an image is constructed and why it is a bad idea for a poet to put out a CD of poetry.

In addition to writing ABOUT poetry, Brown often posts his own work as examples in the column, as well as on the forums at gotpoetry.com. He also books featured readers at a weekly poetry event in Providence, Rhode Island. Drop by Zero Point Zero and GotPoetry. Sit down. Get comfortable. Enjoy. There”s plenty of meat for thought and thought to keep you busy.