Bard Bart - Poetic Rhymes and Punchlines (Poems Only)

"Bard Bart - Poetic Rhymes and Punchlines" won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award as Best Book-Poetry Category from the North American Bookdealers Exchange (NABE) in 2017, and has received top critical reviews. It is a book of carefully structured poems, with rhythm, rhyme, and meticulous wordsmithing, which invariably offer critical life lessons in the form of powerful poetic punchlines.

This book contains poetry for the people, a return to the days when poetry truly mattered, when bards spoke to the masses in rhythm and rhyme to share important life lessons. Poetry was profoundly important and entertaining then, and it is in this book as well. These poems are tightly structured. They display a patterned symmetry and flow leading logically and inexorably to teachable moments, usually captured by powerful poetic punchlines. Meter, rhythm, and pace render them eminently readable, lyrical, even musical. All poems have tight and creative rhyming patterns. Diction and syntax reflect meticulous wordsmithing with word choices, phrasing, and figurative language thoughtfully employed throughout.

Bart Johnson is a career business executive in financial services and mortgage lending. He has always been something of a modern Renaissance Man, with a passion for creative activities. Born and raised in Michigan, he has lived in a total of seven states and resides now in Longmont, Colorado. He is an avid traveler having visited more than forty countries on five continents in a variety of civilized and adventure trips. Bart has been a winemaker with his own private labels, first Bart Noir and more recently Entendre Wines. But his true passion is now and always has been writing, and he has written and published award-winning business articles and newsletters, travel articles, short stories, poetry, and the book noted below. Semi-retired from his business career, he recently published this book, "Bard Bart: Poetic Rhymes & Punchlines", and is working on several other projects. "Up North: A Better Place and Time" is a memoir of Bart's family's annual childhood trips from inner-city Detroit to Northern Michigan, where they traded big city living to become hunters and gatherers with their bounty-trapping grandfather. The book featured poems from him and from seven other family members. It won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award as the Best Book – Inspirational Category from the North American Bookdealers Exchange (NABE) in 2002.