Everything I’ve written or made in the aftermath of my wife’s sudden passing in 2015 is here, some of it in multiple formats, for free, accessible via the drop-down menus above. Status, fame, money–-those fruits of external validation and public recognition–-all appeared irrelevant, impertinent really, from the shadow of that loss. So “free” was important to me. And time felt most pressing: I wanted my work out there RIGHT NOW.  This website is the way I accomplished all that: free, here, right now.  I was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh for the last 37 years of my 40+ year career; here is a link to a thumbnail CV of my academic credentials: KameenCVProfessorWeb new

Everything can be accessed directly from the drop-down menus above.                           Below are my newest creations in the various media I work in.                                              Below that I describe briefly each of the headings in the top banner.

Here is everything I’ve finished over the last six months or so. PDFs free, paperbacks on Amazon at cost of production. 

Newest Monograph

Willing Spirit: essays on quantum mechanics and capitalism

March 14, 2025: It struck me the other day while I was walking that my greatest gift might be that I don’t actually believe in any singular set of answers to the eternal human questions. A singularity in quantum and cosmic physics is merely a place where the mathematics we have available to us crashes, usually by defaulting to infinity as a solution. I prefer to see in each -ism I explore the insights it is good at proffering, the foundational values or principles that inspire it, all the way up to the point where the math defaults to infinity. I do this with every system I study, exploring it until the math fails, which it always does. Then I superimpose what’s left of them, one over another and another, creating a sort of palimpsest. The Venn diagram of their overlaps, tiny as it might be, becomes what, at the moment, I feel I can relatively reliably trust as “true.” At least until a new math becomes available. This book pursues that initiative in two contrary directions: The first essay proposes quantum mechanics as a new paradigm for an ethical life in the 21^st century. The second critiques the most serious impediment to that enterprise: capitalism.

willing spirit 4:17

newest book of essays: Reading/Writing Outside the Lines

November 26, 2024: “All of a sudden, in late October [2023], I went from having no books on my docket to five, each of which looked really interesting to me.I figured I’d read a bit of each to decide which to focus on first, then stage the others going forward. They were all so captivating to me, though, each in its own way, I just couldn’t pick one. So I ended up reading them all simultaneously, ten or fifteen pages of one, maybe a chapter of the next and so forth, night after night for a couple of weeks.Very shortly a wonderful thing began to happen: I’d be in the midst of one and would think I was still somehow in the midst of one of the others. Or, occasionally, all of the others! It was as if I was not reading five separate books about widely divergent subjects set in vastly different contexts, but one book with five different facets. I began to wonder how that could possibly be.” The essays in this book report three successive iterations of that wonderment, enacting a method (not a theory) of reading anyone can apply to their own reading preferences and rhythms.

reading writing outside the lines  4/7

newest poetry book: the other side of the light

November 8, 2024: “Poets, like all artists, can inhabit liminal spaces that are both vividly present, right now, documenting the moment, and powerfully futural, opening ways towards what’s next and new. These two ways of “envisioning,” often at odds in settled times, tend to coalesce cooperatively at historical moments like ours, an old order on the way out, a new one not yet fully fledged, see-er and seer becoming one. The poems in this book may seem on the surface to be doing the former in an extreme way—they are tiny and precise records of perceptions, almost-nothings in a way—and very little if any of the latter—absent as they are of assertions or prescriptions, or even linguistic novelties. For me, what these poems don’t do is more important than what they do. My foundational belief is that the eyes we see with create a default path forward. So to alter that path, which is urgently important right now, one needs first to learn to look in a new way at what’s right there, now, in the moment.”

the other side of the light PDF 

“Anyone who goes against the pace of the grind culture is living as an outlier and a risk-taker.”                                                                                                                              Tricia Hersey

Personal Essays:

I’ve written 14 books of personal essays since 2016. This Fall, my keystone book, which opens the series, was  named as a “Notable Book” in the ShelfUnbound Indie Book Awards. These books are available for free, here, via the drop-down menu above, and in paperback and Kindle form, at cost, on Amazon.com.This Fall, Last Spring, and First, Summer are also available as audiobooks here and/or on Audible.com.

Poetry:

 I’ve written 6 books of poems since my wife passed in 2015. I also include 2 others that compile poems I published individually earlier in my career.  It’s all here for free, in PDF form from the drop-down menu at the top the page, along with audiobooks for many of them. Paperbacks and Kindle versions are available at cost on Amazon.

Scholarly Books:

I published two scholarly books during my career as an English professor. The first, Writing/Teaching, which won the College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in 2002, explores the teaching of writing in the context of cultural and historical ideology. My second book, Re-reading Poets, documents my life-long love of poetry via the many specific poets who have made my life deeper and more livable. The publisher owns copyrights on these books, which are available at their cost via the usual online venues. I provide more information about these under the “Scholarly Books” drop-down, above.

Essays and Talks:

I published numerous articles and book chapters during my career, the major ones (from the 80s and 90s, when articles rather than books were the primary vehicles for scholarly exchange) are available here in PDF form. I also include my favorite talk, and a couple of stand-alone essays, including  the first essay I wrote after my wife passed, which opened the portal to all the rest of this work.

Music

I started singing in 2015, not long after my wife died. In the meanwhile I’ve produced dozens of cover albums and 9 albums of original songs. The latter are archived at https://paulkameen.bandcamp.com.  I include a few of my cover albums here.

My Work on Other Platforms:

Instagram: In a series called “my tiny poems from olympia,” I assemble reels from photos/videos I take on my walks and combine them with poems I write to “illustrate” them. You can find them at https://www.instagram.com/paulkameen/.

Bandcamp: After my wife died I began to play guitar and sing for emotional release. I recorded many cover albums to share with family and friends. Then, all of a sudden, I began to binge-write my own songs, recording 9 albums, archived now for free at https://paulkameen.bandcamp.com/   This burst lasted for three years, then stopped completely. I have no way to account for it aside from the sometimes strange effects of trauma on creative production.

YouTube: I’ve created a number of montages from photos I take on my walks with musical accompaniments. There is also a series of videos of me doing “fireside mini-readings of my tiny poems”: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGc0sDl44WnOI9hjIBTenJg