More Poems About Purple Wizards and Our Neon-Bright Exceptionalisms is, first and foremost, a book of collected poetry. It’s also, however, an exercise in book design and, for some, an entry to participate in The Game of Poems. In an effort to promote the book and decompress a bit from putting it together, I thought I’d do a short series of posts about its origin story.

The collection began, as most collections do, when its mommy collection and its daddy collection met, fell in love and kissed. Then, 10 months later – POOF! – a little purple wizard was born.And the purple wizard was a sweet, little toddler and a charming young person and a moody adolescent and an inquisitive young adult and a stressed-out grown-up and a collector of facts and incantations and aphorisms and finally the wizened purple-spirited book appearing before you today.

Purple Wizards, as a concept, began with the poem “Royal and Wrinkled with Age”, though that’s the poem that winds up now closing the collection. That poem has a line, “The Purple Wizard stands on a barren hillside / facing the rising sun,” that worked its way into the book cover collage (which I’ll talk about in a subsequent Purple Wizard Tale). I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of the wise, old person, persnickety yet divine, seemingly frail but truly full of fire. The book itself may or may not be concerned with that fascination but, nevertheless, I do hope we all grow to become Purple Wizards in our own right.

If you’d like to read more about Purple Wizards – and our neon-bright exceptionalisms – I wrote a book about ’em! You can buy it here.