Welcome. Pulsebeat 02 picks up where Pulsebeat 01 left off, with a generous selection of expertly crafted and enjoyable poems by accomplished poets. I feel a little sheepish that poets of this caliber are submitting their work to me, a renegade cutting tool engineer impersonating a poetry editor, but also happy, since it has brought a lot of interesting poems my way that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
This issue’s cover photo shows a close-up of grooved aluminum test disk, which looks a little like an old vinyl phonograph record, except the grooves don’t spiral in but are concentric like tree rings. This disk was made a few years ago, when I was cutting narrow grooves in aluminum surfaces to retain wear-resistant coatings produced by thermal spraying with a steel feedstock. The objective was to reduce component weight for engine blocks and brake rotors, although only the block work went into production. With the switch to electric powertrains it will all go the way of the buggy whip soon enough.
On the engineering front, I’m down to four days a week, and I don’t miss work on my new day off. I plan to fully retire sometime in the fall, depending on when four machines get installed in a local factory and at least one is tooled up and dialed in.
I am overjoyed to announce that my new poetry collection, Wall of Sound, will be published by Kelsay Books later this year or early in 2023. Contributors and others on the official Pulsebeat master email list should brace themselves for Wall of Sound marketing spam in the fall.
The reading period for Pulsebeat 03, which will be posted in September, begins June 1. This will be the last issue for 2022, and thus the last opportunity to get in on the ground floor by submitting musical poetry. Until September, please enjoy all the wonderful poems in this issue.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 