Brent Futo
Brent Futo (Born 1959) is an American poet. He published his first poem at the age of eight in the community section of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his hometown paper.1 That early success motivated him to continue writing poetry as he grew-up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. Futo developed an early appreciation for the style of traditional, romantic, and lyrical poets, citing some of his major influences as William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe.² As a self-proclaimed lyric poet, Futo was fascinated by the sounds, melodies, and rhythms produced by the arrangement of syllables, words and phrases. Throughout his teenage years, and early adulthood, he experimented with traditional poetic formats, adding his own contemporary twists to the rhyme scheme and meter. In spite of his emerging style and continued production, however, Futo was unable to find any significant audience for his poems, limited to publication in a handful of small journals and obscure magazines.
Throughout his twenties and thirties, Futo continued to refine his traditional, lyrical style, often choosing dark, [...], or political themes for his poems. He balanced his so-called "perverse" side³, with a body of work that also included religious, inspirational, and romantic poetry. He also wrote a plethora of songs and two novels, none of which were published. His only significant publishing success was in 1991, with a political humor book "The Saddam Hussein Dictionary".4 Despite his other pursuits, poetry remained Futo's primary creative passion. He produced hundreds of largely unpublished poems during this period.
In 1999, frustrated by his inability to find an audience for his traditionally-styled poems through print media, Futo turned to an unlikely venue for a traditionalist: the internet. Recognizing the possibilty of building a much larger audience through the emergence of web technology, Futo launched a website in December 1999, aptly entitled Lyric Poet: Voices and Visions of a Fallen Poet. He enhanced the presentation of the text of his poems with photographic images, often provocative, and sometimes disturbing. In conjunction with the publication of his poems in other on line venues, such as Sliptongue Magazine, Futo's subsequent focus remained building his internet readership via his original website. He continues to create and publish new work therein. Currently LyricPoet.net has a world-wide readership of several thousand visitors per month.5
Notes
1.Atlanta Journal-Constitution 2.Lyric Poet Biography 3. ibid 4. Amazon Books 5. Tripod/Lycos Member Site Statistics