News From the Front, a new e-chapbook, is now available on the Dead Mule...

Sometimes poems come to me like guilty Saturday matinees, movies you would never watch unless you were home sick with the flu; chicken & stars steaming on the side table beside you, your mother on the phone in the other room. Your head is enlarged and the sunlight falls greasy and pointed upon the yellow wallpaper of the television room.

This October, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature published my new electronic chapbook of poetry, News From the Front, a collection of war themed poetry. Many of the poems have discovered life elsewhere: The Delaware Poetry Review, Anderbo, Xanadu, & Winning Writers: War Poetry.

Please enjoy.

Seven Days from the Mountain, a young adult adventure & retelling of the Odyssey, is available for the Kindle and will be featured in a Young Adult Publishing Blog in November.

About Seven Days on the Mountain

"The action in Whitaker's prose flows crisply, and was exciting to the point where I would want to turn the page before I was done reading."-- Nate McFadden

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Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Librar y for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor. Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards. It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series. Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

#PresidentBannon, feudal #America. Dugin's influence on the White House

Op Ed. Ramble. Steve Bannon is often described as a Neo-Nazi, or just a Nazi. He really isn’t. That’s way too simple. He knows his Nazi imagery and iconography, evident from the “America First” inauguration speech, the lingo of the campaign, plus the regime’s early policy. Bannon claims to be a Nationalist, one with an originalist view of the Constitution, much like Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s pick for SCOTUS. So what do you get when you thread a Fascism fetish, Old-School Constitutional thinking, and capitalism? American feudalism. A loose federal government, controlled by a strong military, the oligarchy ruling class lording over the spoils of the states which would possibly be recombined, even, into loose nations, pooling resources, and trade leverage. Dystopia schmopia. And how would that even happen? We’ll have to go through Russia to get there. If you’re just catching onto Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller for that matter, two power hungry conservatives ru

Common Core Standards and Urban Decay Inspire First Poem for 30/30 May

This May I will be giving my time to write 30 new poems for Tupelo Press, which is in the throes of raising money via crowd-sourcing for new projects. They are non profit. Grants remain at recession lows. So, this morning as I met with my graduating seniors during their one on one conference (we discuss plans for success, grades, papers, attendance, etc) I pulled up Common Core Apps while waiting for a senior to fetch his book for his book report. The app is Common Curriculum , a cool lesson plan and web posting service. For some reason the idea struck to adopt some of the standards for a United States of Poetry--which sounded dystopian and Orwellian to my ears. So I mashed up some made up standards with some urban decay riffs. The urban decay riffs will need tweaking as they don't really strike any new visual ground, but rather cull standard tropes together. The made-up Common Core riffs are meta, and will also need to be made consistent. There is obvious commentary about CC

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