James Lyte
Poetry.
A Short Biography
Born and raised for most his life in Akron, Ohio, James Lyte has only just recently moved to Mishawaka, Indiana to teach creative writing at Greene University. His childhood friend, Danny Blanco, teaches there. Lyte has been writing poetry since seventeen. He's quite a late bloomer as most would say. His first poem, which he loved, was lost becuase he was seventeen and dumb. It was called Gravedigger. Revised versions of his second and third are in Daily Prisms. He is neighbors of that childhood friend, Blanco and Blanco's wife. Lyte has two gray cats named Bentlidge and Mocha and one beautiful wife, a painter named CJ. His cats does not paint like CJ does, but they like destroying red couches.
COMPLETED WORKS
Daily Prisms
Daily Prisms was a challenge set forth by the author to see if he could write at least one poem each and every day. Ultimately, he failed. Some breaks were taken. Some dates were fabricated. And while writing a poem each day did not come to fruition, it served as a great exercise to write at least something every day even when writing felt too difficult or out of reach.
Tangible Colors
Tangible Colors explores the different feelings and experiences that colors can create in the mind. Each poem has an emotion or intangible concept attached to it, along with a poetry type, black and white picture, and color. In this way, through the words and experiences they evoke, love and identity can become as tangible as concrete.
Dyed Dwellings
Dyed Dwellings is a collection of four longer poems. The first of the four, An Ode to the Tiny, Fearful Ambassadors, is a continuation of a poem in Tangible Colors. The second, The Whirlpool Collection, is a rewritten project, exploring the lies many believe about shame and guilt. The third, Under Demolition, is a smattering of variations on the word, soulless. The fourth, Dyed Dwellings, is an illustration of Mishawaka and Akron from the perspective of a longtime resident of both.
Tinted Fires
Tinted Fires is a dive into the relationship between anxiety and dreams, a journey of reconciling with reality while being haunted by nightmares. Brand sets Tinted Fires to music for the purpose of sharing those anxieties in an aural form. From the burns of the past in Rock Bottom to the refusal to drown in Repetition, Lyte, after three collections, continues to push the boundary of humanity while staying completely grounded.
Everything Tones
Everything Tones is a collection of eighty-five poems. In its infancy, it was meant to be four hundred poems. Upon realizing that was almost impossible for one poetry collection, the project was forgotten. But not for long, as James Lyte saved his own day, finding seventeen words to craft into variations. Each section is a comprised of a title and word, wherein that word functions somewhere in the poems of that section. There are five poems per section of varying lengths, but somewhere in the ballpark of five lines to two pages of poetry.
PLANNED WORKS
In the Middle
A Collaboration between husband and wife.
Chromatic Reservoirs
Propaganda from the Anti-Suicide Club.