About Denis M. Garrison

Personal

Denis M. Garrison was born in northern Iowa in 1946. His family and philosophical roots are in black dirt country. He has lived all over the United States, several years in Asia, in North Africa, and in Europe. He received his early schooling in Tokyo, Japan and in Sukiran and Naha, Okinawa. He served in Okinawa and in Taiwan while in the Air Force, and aboard the USS Ranger in Viet Nam while in the Navy. He has worn many hats in a varied life: sailor, airman, mechanic, electrician, debt collector, sporting goods salesman, quality control technician, boiler-room operator, bureaucrat, small businessman, priest, poet, editor and publisher. A lifelong photographer and a graduate of the New York Institute of Photography, Denis was the first photographer admitted to the Maryland Federation of Artists, with a B&W portfolio. A Marylander since 1960, Garrison now lives near Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay with his lovely wife, Deborah, and devotes his full time to writing, editing, and publishing.

Poetry

A 1974 university graduate in English Literature from Towson, where he edited the literary magazine and chaired the Towson English Association, Denis taught creative writing for Johns Hopkins University's Free University. His poetry is published in Poetry Scotland, Ribbons, Magnapoets, Tangled Hair, Nightingale, Eucalypt, Simply Haiku, Moonset, Wisteria, Roadrunner, Trilopia, Verse Libre Quarterly, Stirring, World Haiku Review, Haiga Online, and many others.

Garrison had published several poems and short stories, as well as an essay on dichotomies in the modern novel, before the 1975 self-publication of his poetry chapbook, Port of Call and Other Poems (1975). He has published four full-length books of poetry: Eight Shades of Blue (haiku, 2005), Hidden River (haiku, 2006), Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems (2007), and Fire Blossoms: The Birth of Haiku Noir (2008). He has edited the journals, Modern English Tanka, Concise Delight Magazine of Short Poetry, Ambrosia: Journal of Fine Haiku, Modern Haiga, Haiku Harvest, Ku Nouveau, Haiku Noir, Templar Phoenix, Haiku Cycles, Gunpowder River Poetry, Amaze: The Cinquain Journal, and Loch Raven Review. Together with Michael McClintock, Garrison has edited the new wave tanka anthologies, The Five-Hole Flute, The Dreaming Room, Landfall, and Streetlights. Garrison also edited the Ash Moon Anthology (tanka on aging) together with Alexis Rotella.

Garrison has created three new poetic forms. The cinqku and crystalline haiku analogues have become popular forms for innovative tanka and haiku poets. (See Garrison’s articles on cinkus, crystallines, and nautiluses at Scribd.com; click on the Scribd.com icon below to view them and more.) The nautilus has a mathematical basis. Garrison’s poem, Nautilus, the prototype and namesake of the form (which is comprised of a Golden Mean stanza bracketed by ascending and descending Fibonacci sequences), has been included in an academic text, Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft), ISBN 978-9042023703, by Marcia Birken & Anne C. Coon, faculty members at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

Garrison serves as a judge for poetry contests, especially cinquain and tanka contests.

See Denis Garrison's interview at WhoHub.com.

Nonfiction

Garrison has published a great many nonfiction items about national health insurance. He also compiled and published the first comprehensive set of Old Roman Rite service books and several related books, and edited a denominational newsletter for more than a decade. He earned his doctorate in theology from St. Ephrem’s Institute for Eastern Christianity Studies in Solna, Sweden for his religious writings.