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Showing posts from November, 2011

A Few Things from the Desk

The editors from "Dream the End" have been in touch to ask if they could select work from 'Nevertheless' for the current issue of the zine. An unusual presentation of the poems: Dream the End I've been contacted by the Poetry Foundation, who have asked permission to run ten of the poems in collaboration with PIW. This one is very good news indeed. Since I've stopped actively publishing, the work that is already out in the world moves round a little, without any help from me. That some of the poems have legs is comforting, though of course I'd prefer they had wings. Also, I've discovered that New Walk Magazine, out of Leicester, England, will be running a review of "Nevertheless" in their upcoming issue. Hope it comes down in general on the favorable side. It's a strong journal. And finally, the visual work is currently featured at the Blue Pig Gallery out in Palisade: Blue Pig

Stay Limber !

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(Mueller)

The Examiners, Take II, III, and IV

A year or so ago I was asked to do a reading outdoors in the downtown area here in town. It was a blustery, miserable evening and nobody at the microphone could be heard over the din and chaos of the wind. I knew I couldn't read any of my little lyrics into that bluster, so I leafed through my journal, which flew (did I mention it was windy?) open to John Whitworth's "The Examiners". It is a great, ambitious poem, full of foreboding and humor, paranoia and obsession, with a chilling, weird refrain and many sweet spots and blind alleys. Even the wind that night was no match for that poem. I do believe I might've actually howled it out. That remarkable poem has now been put to music by John Wesley Harding, whose latest album is a collaboration with Peter Buck from REM. I couldn't be happier for Mr Whitworth, the curmudgeonly old 'light verse' poet from England. He's a master craftsman and a remarkably unique poet, with great range. The articl
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In a secular society such as ours, bound by the tyrannical consensus of materiality, where the realm of imagination is reductively considered only the imaginary , any hint of the visionary is often summarily flattened with irony or deflated by good utilitarian common sense. - R Nemo Hill Extraordinary conversation between Nemo and Tom Merrill here: Hypertexts (click "Spotlight")
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I hate to boast but I make the best humble pie ever. - Robert Schechter

Wendy Videlock in the NYT

Once a poem has been published and unleashed unto the world, one never knows where it will be reproduced. One could do worse than the back pages of the New York Times. With thanks to a kindly reader who alerted me to this: NYT
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Warm in November

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Nouns of Assemblage

Murmuration
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My war, and I have yet to win a decisive battle -- is with the modes of thought which prevail in psychology and therefore in the ways we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions which clamp the mind and heart into economics, fundamentalism, and positivistic science. James Hillman
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Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom. --Thomas Carlyle

And by the way let us recount our dreams

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