For some people, summations of life and living can be expressed minimally, darkly, but still thoughtfully and with emotion.

As artists who come to DARKLING realize, a serious appreciation of the shadowy parts of life is what we seek to present our readers. It's fitting, really, that DARKLING's Featured Poet for 2009 seems to enjoy the same on a very basic, sometimes twisted, and altogether approachable and enjoyable level.

At least as far as his typewritten, two-page response to our questionnaire would have one believe.

This typewriter has to go, said Arthur Gottlieb, of Tigard, Oregon. I'm running out of ribbons. But my son tells me I'm too old to be learning the computer.

To the Darkling Publications Editorial Board, that statement is one of the darkest ever spouted by a DARKLING Featured Poet. Explanation of this idea should not be necessary.

While a bard of the darkness, Gottlieb, age 82, married twice, five children, a life of experience and memories seriously beckons the light in the shifting tides of darkness in our world.

Thank God for the sun, he said "Without it, nothing. Ancient Egyptians had it right, worship light. Still, dark is half the natural state.

Balance, perhaps, is necessary.

Gottlieb's work exposes the darknesses of very basic, real life. Readers who know Gottlieb recognize it when they see it.

For editors, the typewritten pages Gottlieb submits add a certain ambience that most readers, sadly, don't get to appreciate.

Biographically, Gottlieb didn't offer much about himself.

He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and joined the U.S. Army at age 18. He was saved from combat by, as he writes, being saved by the dropping on Japan of the A-bomb. He served overseas as a reporter on the Pacific staff of Stars and Stripes. After his military service, Gottlieb attended and graduated from the University of Miami law school in 1950. He summed up the rest of his life very shortly.

I practiced law, married, had two children, divorced, left Florida after about 20 years, and traveled; married again, had three children, wrote poetry in Oregon, realized that to read your poem in print is a different experience than creating it, he said, leaving the rest of his two page questionnaire almost exclusively to poetry.

I have been writing a long time, publishing but a few 10 or 20 years, Gottlieb said. "I have tons of poems never sent out, notes and scraps I never seem to want to discard. They may come in handy, but I never have time to review them."

On influences, Gottlieb again makes it very brief, but painfully deep. "Most emotional influences: Holocaust, divorce, birth, death, opera (Puccini), poet: Plath."

Gottlieb lets words flow onto the page in lieu of arguing them into arrangement. Much of his work has an earthy flavor grounded in the elements of life, the elements of shadow, the lump in the throat, the depths of humanity's spirit. But he does it with a wink in his words that makes his readers smile.

Perhaps most awkward to serious poets is the fact that Gottlieb doesn't edit his poems to death, if at all. "I seldom revise," he said. "I write less by logic than by magic of association. One word linked to another brings to mind adventure, or a picture. If I cry, I know it's good."

This "stream-of-consciousness" approach is more honest and real for Gottlieb.

"Too much labor will show up as stilted prose," he said. "Enjambment, connecting ends of lines with beginnings of the next, gives poems body, saves it from a rote listing."

Enjambment is a Gottlieb hallmark. His technique is so clever it forces the reader to laugh in spite of the subject matter (one of his poems in a past edition of DARKLING highlights a wife feeding a husband his internal organs).

"Most of my poems are black," Gottlieb said. "Black is the blot and scribble that has meaning for me, most of my poetry is dark, deep dark. The only light at the end of the tunnel is a train on the same track coming my way. When the collision occurs, that will be the end."

Gottlieb writes every day, his material, oozing out of my subconscious. He plays with the plasticity of words, how syllables can possess varying slants; he considers this rubbery nature of the English language to be the source of wit and introspection.

"Since this discovery is endless, it is the source of its universality," Gottlieb said. "Material can be gleaned from newspapers, conversation, personal happenings and changes in nature just to name a few."

Poetry, Gottlieb said, is nothing less than, a concentration, a distillation, a microscope and telescope of mind in which one person views the world both here and in outer space.

"Scrambling words in an existing poem often reveals insights never thought of before. Periods are arbitrary; lines don't have to end, they can extend forever with startling results. Everything is connected. In some way. You just have to think of some wry twist: of fate, of fortune? See what I mean?"

He has only one other artistic medium. "I'm a frustrated painter," Gottlieb said. "I want to do abstract expressionistic watercolors, but have no time. The few I've framed line my room, collect dust. I'm the only one who enjoys them on a daily basis."

Gottlieb's advice is simple: "Stash the tons of notes you collect that you will probably never, but maybe someday, review to dig out those gold nuggets."

If his typewriter ribbons hold out, Gottlieb may have many nuggets left to offer the world.

DARKLING hopes Arthur Gottlieb's supply never run out.