to a more unique and contemporary attitude of color and composition.
stage performer and within the last 20 years has become a published poet and screenwriter.
decades within the Film and Television Industry.
Having served his talents as a Scenic Artist, Set Dresser, Set Decorator, Production Designer and Stage Hand.
their industrious years of the 1970’s and 80’s.
continues to paint, write and publish his music and poetry while residing in Los Angeles California.
everywhere in between, wherever our minds choose to travel as we take a magical ride with poet, Tom MacLear.
Connecting with an audience is one of the most rewarding experiences for any author or even songwriter.
Tom MacLear is fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do both.
MacLear’s latest project, Inside A String, published by Water Forest Press Books is a collection of poems, essays, lyrics, and prose.
Inside A String has already sold out of its first soft release and will be reprinted and re-released to fans later in the year.
Our editorial staff was lucky enough to get a copy beforehand and from what we have reviewed there’s no contest.
This piece is a must read and perfect edition to anyone’s collection.
Q: What can your current fans and other poetry lovers anticipate in this debut?
A: This book marks the birth of a new creative path for me, a path that lends a greater freedom for my art, with no restraints to pin me down.
Q: What upcoming projects are you working on?
A: I feel its time for me to close old doors and open up new roads to travel.
My belief is: if art is not allowed to grow, it withers and dies inside you.
So with those feelings at the forefront, I have begun to complete the recording of a Blues CD which I started some 6 years ago, but was forced to put the work on the back burner due to my Nashville project I have been working with since 2010. I hope to complete and release the CD by January of next year.
I am also rewriting a screenplay entitled: ‘Bleecker Street’ which I wrote in 1998 (registered WGA) and went into preproduction with VMS Productions at Warner Hollywood Studios via Writer / Director / Producer: CW Cressler in 2004.
We had two ‘A’ list actors in Dennis Hopper (A major financial contributor in the project) and Peter Fonda. This would have been their first film together since their legendary 60’s classic Easy Rider. Unfortunately, the project was pulled from the table, due to Dennis’s other film projects in Europe that ran beyond schedule and which caused Peters window of availability to close.
The story line is a fiction based on the factual accounts of one family of musicians, painters, poets, actors/activists and their life spent within the trials and tribulations of the 60’s counter culture movement rooted in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village during its Zenith, an army of artisans living side by side, generating a voice for the new-youth-order of the counter culture movement. How things worked, how things failed and how the movement never really ended and how it still waits to find a time to reconnect with the next generation of eager and authentic idealists.
Nevertheless I believe the historic and aesthetic content of ‘Bleecker Street’ will have something new to bring to the table which has yet to be captured midst all of the other past tributes produced about Greenwich Village and the years of the Counter Culture movement.
Lastly, I am hoping to spend time on my next book, which will be a part 2 to INSIDE A STRING (another collection of essays, prose and lyrics from my days of travel and performances), but it will have a more direct message and intent towards a very significant theme I am obsessed with in these recent years.
Q: Is there going to be an official book tour for the release and where can readers receive autographed copies?
A: Right now, the book is on a soft release (no major agency or promotion assistance) I am still finding my balance out here in this new medium I’ve just plunged into.
Q: How is your poetry different from your songwriting and which creative expression do you most prefer?
Q: What is the intended message behind Inside A String?
A: I want people to think. And I want people to care about words again.
I want people to realize that reading words is the most accessible, reliable, affordable and most powerful medicine made available to everyone in this world.
And yet, words can be the most destructive, hurtful, diabolic and cancerous entity humankind has ever invented.
…And if people would like to cherish the privilege of words and truly understand the power in how they are used, it could lead the world to the single most enlightening era known to civilization.
It is the interpretation and the state of being of mind in where the reader determines what becomes of the words when ingested.
As one example, the Bible is a manuscript of ink on paper and yet it is the most inspirational as well as the most destructive piece of literature known to this world for over the last 3,000 years.
Q: If you had to choose: Which titled poem from Inside the String is the most meaningful to you and why?
A: The life I have chosen to be is an artist who pushes, inspires or helps further something because of my art.
I don’t want followers. I don’t want people to sit and wait and to turn to the art repeatedly for the crystal ball. I want them in forward motion, making each day better at what they are.
I want to be their river that their life skips upon as they skip across the surface to the other side of where they are heading.
In this light, the poem I would pick would be: “IN THE END” on page #103.
A: I have heard many opinions from my readers of what the title means to them and I do not like to dictate how they should interpret what the title of my book means, let alone what is the meaning of the work itself.
To explain the chosen title, is to explain myself and since I never wrote an introduction to this first book of mine, perhaps an exclusive ‘Introduction’ within this interview is appropriate.
In 1893 Swami Vivekananda ** visited the U.S. and introduced a Neo-Hinduism into the pre-American-industrial-age psyche. This ideology took hold within the ‘literary intelligentsia’ in America, which furthermore galvanized the ethos from which the progressive poets of that time would create their works.
• *Individualism (Wikipedia): In the mid 1800’s, American Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.
This doctrine within the literature of the progressive American poet, was the petri dish from which our Beat Poets i.e.: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, O’Hare and countless others further paved their destiny by demolishing the last vestiges of the dry, redundantly anemic traditional American poem which was already dyeing a slow arduous death.
America’s poets of the 19th and 20th century, should receive the real credit for introducing TM thought and ‘lightness of being’ to the Art’s and social interaction in America, as they were working from this platform 100 years before the Beatles and the Maharishi Yogi brought it to the worlds attention in the 1960’s.
Alarmingly most of these poets I emulated were anarchists and sometimes atheists. I am neither. In fact I am quite religious and I do believe in a democratically elected structure to contain and mange the human psyche and impose a law of governance if only to tame the habitual idiosyncrasies in which our misdiagnosed socio-political neurosis perpetuate one crisis after another which continuously threatens the very existence of our species.
Furthermore I have held on to most of the doctrine of Thoreau and Emerson, but I have cast away the extremes of ‘transcendental idealism’ due to its overt practice of ‘Social and Political decent and ‘civil disobedience’ which in its truest form and practice, most notably Marxism, has only lead to the fracturization of civil cohesiveness while misinterpreting the transcendental idealism and its purity and by doing so, ignites an internal mutation within those who seek a more narcissistic self/existence, regressing to a primal, self foraging, capitalistic-individualism, living within ones own ideology designed for only one, and practicing a ‘dog eat dog,' ‘eye for an eye’ fantasy which no cohesive and authentic civilization can ever be built from.
Since the hay days of the early American TM 'enlightenment' of the 19th century, the life of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, have implemented a more sophisticated technique to socio / political and philosophical change, by means of ‘peaceful disorder and spiritual enlightenment; through peaceful massive social marches, sit-ins, fastings, religious and political lobbying against the corrupt structures of democratic procedure and have altered the world by only the power of the people, prayer and political meditation and mediation. Whatever violence and death that might have occured during these times were events created by violent factions not living true to the Gandhi/MLK doctrine of protest.
In the end I believe we exist on the strength of the ‘collective’ and ‘in’ the partnership by and within everyone around you and I. Just like a pack of wolves, a pride of lions or a tribe of indigenous natives; like fellow beings on this planet, the collective is the only way we will survive as a species and as a civilized form of being upon this earth.
Theory of everything WikipediaA theory of everything (ToE) or final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory refers to the hypothetical presence of a single, all-encompassing, coherenttheoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. ToE is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.
…This led me to study of quantum thought and quantum physics_ hence the end goal of finding and agreeing with the ‘unified string theorem,’ which I believe within its full understanding and utilization within the math of science and within the math of sociological doctrine, can help save a world that seems to be spinning faster than its axis will allow.
The beauty of the title ‘Inside A String’ can lend a most simple yet very powerful visual as you magnify and study what a string actually is.
It is not really just one physical solid entity, but a multitude of countless fibers woven and intertwining through, around and across one another, making a ‘collective’ power of strength which no individual fiber could achieve on its own, yet in its practiced final version, it stands incredibly strong.
Excerpts from Inside A String now available in our Forum!
Inside A String: INSIDE A STRING: A collection of poems, essays, lyrics and prose by songwriter/author; Thomas MacLear.
Award wining songwriter, producer, entertainer and poet Tom MacLear has captured a span of life from the east to the west in his new book, Inside a String. Those familiar with Hemingway, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Dylan and Ginsberg will enjoy the “Beat” flavor of the poetry in this book as well as some of the more simple, straightforward attacks on our hearts and our senses. These poems speak to the reader and take us on that wonderful journey from the depths of city life in NYC to the beautiful coastlines of California and everywhere in between, wherever our minds choose to travel as we take a magical ride with poet, Tom MacLear.
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As a huge fan of the beats (Kerouac and Ginsberg are among my favorites), I felt very much at home in the pages of Tom MacLear’s book.
It was like wrapping myself in a cozy, warm blanket.
each very much a part of those artists who shaped America’s culture.
Written with honesty, sometimes rawness, and often lyrical beauty. Take this journey into the heart and soul of an incredible human being.
universally depicts the overall feeling of love that America was trying to feel during the Viet Nam War era.
This poem is part of inside a string, a book of poetry, prose and essays by musician and writer Tom MacLear.
This young man's talents are hardly brushed by his latest work. One hopes he will continue to explore and expand his writing, his art, his music and his unique persona! Scots should also be aware of his significant contributions to their lives and appreciation of the arts.
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