DUTCH EARS is a book-length poem in the Modernist tradition, inspired and incited by many things, both literary and extra-literary. The narrator, Powell Douglas, is a quasi-misanthropic middle school teacher and adjunct professor experiencing the very beginning of the Covid pandemic. The poem is tangential, idiosyncratic, antagonistic, and associative, shifting in POV, but all the while telling a story. It is, in part, a love poem (to poetry) and it is a splintered elegy to the narrator's past lives. DUTCH EARS, at it's best, is language in conversation with itself. But ultimately, this poem is about the struggle for individuality in a culture that celebrates herd behavior. A languid sigh in the face of contemporary America, Dutch Ears is a powerful and uncompromising epic.