About Eliot Jacobson Ph.D.

I am retired, two grown sons, four grandkids. Married to Arlene for over 20 years. I was a professor of Mathematics at Ohio University (1983-1998), professor/lecturer of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara (1998-2009), and owner of my casino consulting business Jacobson Gaming (2005-2017). I retired in 2017.

Mostly I try and find ways to volunteer. I volunteer at the community access TV station (TVSB) as a producer & director, I hang out just a bit with the poetry community, with the “VIPs” (volunteers in policing), and until recently a docent for elephants at our local zoo (sadly, the last elephant passed away last year).

My hobbies include playing music (lately, Irish tunes on the fiddle), writing poetry and playing and watching chess. Okay — watching chess is a guaranteed time waster, but the very best chess in the history of the universe is being played by the latest computer programs. It’s just fun.

In my spare I’net time, I watch YouTube videos about geeky things — like physics, math, computer stuff, etc. That part of my life is still there at some level. Check out the Numberphile and PBS Space Time channels.

My most significant professional accomplishment seems to be the third book I wrote, on methods to beat just about every casino game and promotion. I just re-listed it after taking it down in 2017. And surprise, I was just informed that I will be given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas in March, 2020.

Poetry inhabits a place of uncertainty. The reader’s attention, forced beyond the apparent intention of the words, words written, remembered, overheard, resonant with levels of metaphors, describing events real and imagined, sourced from inside the deep well of associations, attempts to reassemble disconnected components into an uncompromisingly pronounced truth. Published poet Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D., shares such poems in this volume.

The author inhabits the shared suffering, the neurosis of disconnection that is ruining modern humanity. He describes a world that sucks meaning out of trivialities while shirking from the uncompromising language and truth of numbers, the description of what is. The author attacks this disconnection in poems that range from personal relationships to politics and to the accelerating failure of the planet and its ecosystems. His poems speak from and of the degrading genetic material of life on this sacred and lonely planet.