Tea & Sprockets: A Modern American Poetry Book

By D.L. Lang

Tea & Sprockets: A Modern American Poetry Book is the debut poetry collection by modern American poet D.L. Lang. This 150 page single author anthology spans 15 years of work encompassing poems from 1995 to 2010. Across the 106 selected poems, Lang weaves together themes of love and friendship, death and loss, war and peace.

 

Tea and Sprockets is honest. The poems speak of isolation, of feeling different from one's peers, of living in a time of perpetual war. However, Tea and Sprockets also speaks of enduring love, hope and a longing for peace within the poet and for the entire world. Thank you for giving your work to the world, D.L. Lang. That, itself, is a great act of peace. - Amy Gioletti, author of Woman Bone
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: D.L. Lang
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201500139

D.L. Lang

D.L. Lang is the author of 13 poetry books, most recently This Festival of Dreams. She served as poet laureate of Vallejo, California from 2017 to 2019, performing hundreds of times across California at county fairs, literary events, and political demonstrations. She has been published in dozens of anthologies worldwide. Her poems have been transformed into songs, Jewish liturgy, and used to advocate for peace and justice. She can be found online at poetryebook.com

Book preview

Tea & Sprockets

To fully know me now, one must know something of my past.

To know something of my past is to open the door

into wounds and treasures.

To not open that door is to be left in a cloud of mystery.

To know oneself is the greater treasure

than to know all others.

To achieve this sense of knowing oneself takes a lifetime.

To take a lifetime and not know others is a shame.

Such is the beauty of knowing others

that one forgets to know oneself.

Such mystery in one's own life makes it hard

to write about oneself.

Such is my own case and so I change

in every aspect as I continue in life.

Such poetic nonsense in which I babble to you

now is one aspect of me.

Such form makes you believe that I am a writer,

and I mark you correct.

Such an assumption I should say

does not make me a good writer.

It is for you to judge if I am a good writer.

It is something that cannot be decided by the poet himself.

It is not my place to be caught up in judging my own work.

It is something, which happens before each word is written.

It is a natural process for me to write my soul on a page.

It changes, however, every day, and the words have flexible meanings.

Take this as you wish to take it.

Take it in jest or in pure seriousness.

Take it in its purest simplistic nature.

Take the time to see what you can learn from me.

Take the time to notice that I do not intend to teach.

Take this however you wish to take it, but lightly.

Foreword

I am a poet. It is something ingrained in my soul. In this age of the Internet where wisdom is a freely flowing fountain, I know that one may not see the value in paying for a poetry book by an unknown poet when one can obtain fairly easily the works of the great masters.

By purchasing my books, you support an indie poet; you give life to the words that echoed throughout my soul until they found their way into the hundreds of poems that comprise my books. You breathe life and new meaning into these poems. It is my life’s work, and I am grateful to each one of you for reading.

Is poetry fiction, or is it non-fiction? In my case, it is a bit of both. And so I invite you into a journey of imagination and perceptions of reality, of life, of love, of loss, and of your own creation. These poems mean what you understand them to mean, and that is the beauty of poetry!

It was always a dream of mine to publish a poetry book. I’ve been writing poetry since I was 11 years old. The oldest poems in this book are Surf Clown and The Outsider. Most of the poetry before age 13 is lost.

The title refers to my writing process. I am an avid tea drinker. If you drink a cup of hot tea, you are forced to slow down and appreciate the tea. It is almost a meditative process. Poetry can have a similar contemplative quality about it, but then there’s the sprockets: the every day routine where your mind is constantly churning and the world is constantly turning. You can read poetry in this way as well translated into music or film there is a speedy quality. When I write sometimes the poetry is a direct flowing of my soul so fast that my pen cannot keep up: that is the sprockets. Other times, this is the result of meditation on a theme or word–there’s your tea.

To me, poetry is a coping mechanism, spiritual journey, humorous observation, and linguistic exploration, but what it truly is: my soul on a page. The mystery of poetry is that the reader never truly knows what the writer was thinking, so it takes on a meaning of its own to each person who reads it and relates, or not, to it. It's your poetry now. You'll find poems you love, some that just fall flat, and maybe some you hate, and it's all okay.

Preface

What can I say about Tea & Sprockets? This book has been through several incarnations, containing the largely uncensored thoughts of an adolescent poet between the ages of 12 and 25, skewing more towards the teenager side than the 20-something.

In 1994 I was sitting in my Enid, Oklahoma bedroom reading Moses Horowitz's book, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, absorbing all of his vaudevillian and slapstick memories, when I came across a passage about his decision to start acting at age 11.

Imagine that! I too, was 11 years old! What did I want to be? I wanted to be a writer. Sure, I also wanted to be a cartoonist and an actress, but I knew that I loved to write. I started out writing elaborate fan fiction stories using members of my favorite bands or favorite comedy troupes as characters across various time periods. I also toyed with writing a western and a young adult novel.

The only poem in this book from age 11 is Surf Clown, which came to me at Champlin Pool in Enid while my friends and I were using the floatation devices floating as underwater surfboards. It was inspired by my love of '60s surfer music and came to me in a form that can only be described as a surf rap song.  I recall a teacher writing on a copy of the poem, Brian Wilson would be proud!

When I was 14, our 1992 DOS computer decided to implode, and I learned a valuable lesson—always back up your writing! This sparked a desire to