Mark Hennessy knows a thing or two about touring.

In the early 1990s, his band Paw was Lawrence’s most promising act. The quartet’s label, A&M Records, dispatched the group to various exotic locations, ranging from France to New Zealand to Singapore.

The singer is back on the road after a long hiatus away from the microphone. But for the first time ever, Hennessy finds himself on a book tour where he is reading selections from his debut collection of poetry, “Cue the Bedlam.”

“The second you stand up to read a poem in front of a crowd, you can either embrace the performance aspects of what you’re doing or ignore them,” he says. “I choose to embrace them to the extent that I like a circus atmosphere.”

The 36-year-old musician wrote the majority of the lyrics on Paw’s three albums, 1993’s “Dragline” (which sold several hundred thousand copies), 1995’s “Death to Traitors” and 2000’s “Home Is a Strange Place.” He admits there are noticeable differences between composing poetry and songs.

Mark Hennessy

“In song lyrics you can get away with saying something like ‘pet the dog’ three times in a row without having it sound completely inane,” he says. “The power of the music will allow you to get away with lyrics that – if not stereotypical or uninspired – still have the same sort of ability to move the way words on a page do.

“I think that music is the more powerful form. If I had to choose between the way Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ made me feel inside, versus when I read ‘Hamlet,’ I still think music wins. Poetry takes time to process, and it’s a more subtle thing. But it can be just as powerful a tool for understanding the world. For me it has been.”

Mules and sinking ships
After Paw disbanded in 2000, Hennessy frequently moved around in search of his next career. The journey took him to places such as New York City and Krakow, Poland, where his brother lives.

Now residing in Durham, N.C., the Kansas City native is currently working toward a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at North Carolina State, where he also is teaching creative writing and poetry to undergrads.

While the recently married writer is enjoying his studies, he is not quite so enamored with North Carolina itself.

“I don’t like it nearly as well (as Kansas),” says Hennessy, who lived in Lawrence on and off from the time he turned 18.

“I always tell people I’m from a free state. It’s strange for me to be around racism. In Durham just a couple months ago they were burning crosses. People there think that NASCAR is a sport. They refer to NASCAR drivers as athletes. They think George Bush is a good president.”

It was actually while Hennessy was in Los Angeles where he became inspired to undertake “Cue the Bedlam” (Unholy Day Press, $12.50). The title of the collection refers to a time when he and two buddies were given free reign to drive laps at a go cart track by a preoccupied employee.

“Go carts with no supervision resembled in my head what bedlam is,” he says.

According to his publisher, Hennessy’s poems “embody anxiety and suffering, humor and redemption.” And his work in “Cue the Bedlam” ranges “from the railroad yards of Kansas City, Kan., to the disastrous South Pole expedition of Sir Robert Falcon Scott, from mules in the salt mines of Wieliczka, Poland, to sinking ships in the Indian Ocean.”

Hennessy says, “Some of the things are in blank verse, and for me to know that gives me a small feeling of accomplishment. The fact that I’ve taken all the bad, imitative poetry I did in my 20s and learned to deal with formal aspects gives me pleasure. I’m also proud that there are things that I’ve said well and in a novel fashion in the book.”

No regrets
The former rock star says he still dabbles in music (he’s busy concocting a version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” set to the music of “House of the Rising Sun”), but as an active member of the scene he’s all but retired.

“I love music,” he explains. “I’m never going to be ashamed that it was part of my background. I feel better having that on my resume than being a member of ROTC or something.”

Now Hennessy inserts the raw emotion characterized by the notoriously edgy Paw into his words on the page.

“One of the things that you have to get over is that your mom is going to read what you write,” he says. “And while my mother may not be the person I most want to regale with tales of my self-abuse, there is nothing off-limits in poetry. If you can’t talk about something in a poem, where are you going to be able to talk about it?”