[ihosttemplates/banners.html]

Mad Love

The SunPost Arts Journal

July 2004

Edited by Tony Guzman

Design & Layout by Simone Fong & Maria Saenz

MICHAEL HETTICH

The Stories We Can Never Tell

We got up early to walk along the beach

which looked empty at first but was scattered with large fish

that had somehow been cast beyond the reach of waves

and were flapping a foot or more into the air,

landing with a thud on the wet sand.

We made a game of catching them in mid-air, tossing them

back into the waves, one after the other,

until they all were swimming again, and then

we walked, looking for shells and beach glass,

taking simple pleasure in our nearly naked bodies

in the sun and salt air: So when I mentioned

I believe the body and soul can know themselves

only together, that they are undefined

apart, I meant to imply something larger,

more inclusive, grounded and wild,

that reaches back into the stories we can never tell

because we are the arc of them, because we are their breathing.

JEROME ROTHENBERG

Oceanside Pier: Among the Fishers

The line, more tangled than

the fishing lines at Oceanside,

hangs from a hundred different mouths,

coronas colored in a hundred ways

each one around a brilliant

orifice, bright droplets

white & yellow,

yellow,

red,

the red of circles,

a debris of spirit that the mind

can shape as words,

as sounds more true than words are,

waiting on a pier

above the mackerel-crowded seas,

to hear, to know, to celebrate,

to walk among the fishers,

lines of men & women

phantom residents

of phantom towns,

who fish by day,

go forth at night

into a world inhabited

by dolls,

a mannequin romance,

a gaffer wedging mussels from

black columns,

hearing voices

from below the earth

of animals,

the worlds we haven’t seen

more real

than those we have.

MAGGIE DUBRIS

Excerpt from Skels

            The siren whooped as we fishtailed around the corner onto the block where the call was. Bodies spilled into the street, boys pushing their girlfriends out of the way as Rodie nosed the ambulance close to the curb. Lights from the cop cars flickered a red tattoo across the wall of faces. I tumbled from the cool of the cab into the thick heat, the smell of smoke and beer, screams and, from a window somewhere above us, the sound of a barrelhouse piano, gaily pounding. Police radios crackled from deep inside the crowd and I heard a shout, “Medic!” as some girl grabbed my arm.

            “Piney’s shot, Piney’s shot,” she screamed, pulling me to face her.

            A cop yanked her off me and threw her back into the crowd. Rodie’s head poked around the back of the bus.

            “Get the scoop,” he yelled.

            I wrestled it from the side compartment; the straps were caught and it seemed more cumbersome than the ones at Bellevue. Finally I got it loose and looked around. Rodie was gone, the cops gone also. I scanned the mass of heads and saw a patch of blue, and an empty space near the wall of the project. Holding the scoop in front of me, I started towards it.

            A body blocked my way, the scoop flipped sideways and dug into a girl’s thigh. She twisted, “ Watch it, bitch.”

            “I’m the medic,” I yelled, and she shoved the man in front of her. “Let the medic through, what’s wrong with you all.” The man raised his arm, a bottle of beer clenched in his fist. His fury bounced from the girl to me to the people in front of him. “Move, move, when I say ‘move’, move,” he shouted, shoving two boys to the side.

            I stepped into the hole they’d left. Faces swung suddenly towards mine, my voice calling, “medic, medic,” breaking through the stuttering piano, the screams, babies howling and the crackly voice of a woman singing, someplace far away. I had no idea where I was going, all I could see were tee-shirts and heads. An elbow hit my ribs, my cheek knocked against the scoop, the crowd batted me onward.

            “Medic,” I shouted. “Medic, watch your back.” My voice was tiny, soaked up by the heat, the flesh. I held my arms straight out to make myself bigger and the crowd squeezed open in front of me and sucked closed behind me as I pushed the scoop against them, plowing blindly on until I knocked against a chain of cops.

            The chain opened and I was inside. A black man lay face-up on the sidewalk, blood spattered around him in loose strips. Rodie knelt at his side, four cops stared down as he worked. The man was light-skinned, his face tinged gray, and I felt dizzy just looking at him. He was so young, with red hair oiled flat, and I had this feeling he was already dead. But his eyes were open, moving as he watched Rodie’s arm swing past. I blinked and tried to make sense of what was going on. A cop gripped my shoulder. I couldn’t hear anything he said, just girls wailing, voices tumbling, words in random handfuls, splashing against my ears. Everyone was looking at me, hundreds of eyes, hundreds of voices, and I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do.

            A woman burst from the edge of the crowd, knocking me as she passed. I stumbled, and felt a sharp ache as my knee hit the concrete. I was a medic in Harlem; it was the end of June; my knee was bleeding into my pants, and some woman had just hurled herself onto my patient.

            I grabbed her arm. She wrenched it free.

            “That’s the mother, don’t grab her like that,” a man shouted.

            She engulfed the lanky body. “Baby, Clarence, baby, stay with me,” she moaned. She was short and fat, gold bracelets slipping down her arms as she pulled him to sit. I caught a glimpse of his face falling onto her shoulder, life flickering across it like frames from a movie, slow, slowing down, then he was buried in the brown sheen of her dress. Bodies pressed in on us, an arm brushed my back, a white sneaker flashed across my thigh. The cops wrestled their arms together, bracing against the crowd, the mother wailed and rocked her son. Beyond the linked elbows I saw a boy smashing his fist against the wall of the project, a girl weeping, her face half covered with hair. Finally Rodie and a cop tore the mother away, hurling her into the arms of two men who dragged her backwards.

            “Come on Ma, let ‘em work, Ma,” but still she screamed, pinned to the crowd by either wrist, like a butterfly struggling to break free.

            I knelt beside her son, cutting his shirt. The wound was so small. A dark red hole not half an inch in diameter, surrounded by spirals of flaked blood. He wasn’t bleeding anymore. Yellow circles from the cops’ flashlights danced across him, his chest barely moved, he stared up at me, but I wasn’t sure what he saw.

            “I won’t let you die,” I said. There was no reaction, just the barest fluttering of his lips as he struggled to breathe.

            Rodie had the line in already. We rolled the limp body onto the scoop, tossed the IV bag onto the stomach, and carried him to the ambulance.

            “Tube him,” Rodie said, and ran to the front.

            Fists pounded on the back door as we pulled away. I banged into the wall as Rodie hit a pothole full speed, equipment flew everywhere, and I realized the man had stopped breathing. I stuck the laryngoscope into his mouth. Nothing looked like it did on the dummy. Everything was wet and red, jiggling from the motion of the bus. Behind the epiglottis I located the vocal cords, two strips of ivory, fed the tube into the darkness between them and hoped that I was in.

            It was impossible to hear lung sounds, the siren drowned out everything. The man’s chest was rising a little, but he still looked dead. I felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. The ambu-bag took all my strength to compress, so I knew the tube couldn’t be in the belly. His throat was crooked, his neck veins stood out like ropes. Suddenly the picture flipped into focus. With one hand I reached down and unsealed the chest wound, listening for the hiss of air. Nothing happened. He still lay froglike, his arms flopping with each bounce of the ambulance. Every time I squeezed, the bag got harder, until it felt like I was trying to flatten a football.

            I was supposed to tape the tube in. I should be doing compressions. But Rodie was backing up the bus and I could see the Harlem ER out the rear window, a doctor in his white coat waving us in.

            “I think he has a tension pneumo,” I said, as we dropped the wheels of the stretcher.

            The doctor was already on top of him, syringe in hand. He jammed the needle into the still chest and there was a loud pop as the trapped air rushed out. The plunger shot backwards, grazing the doctor’s cheek as it flew towards the wall.

            “Still no pulse,” he said. A cop car squealed up. The ambu-bag was easy to squeeze now, the man’s blue face half-turned, his neck veins flat. As we rolled towards the doors the mother shot from the cop car and grabbed him, half on the stretcher, her arms in a vise around his chest.

            “Get her out of here,” the doctor said.

            As she gathered her son close the tube ripped from between his lips and the IV bag fell to the floor, backing up in a scarlet curl.

            “He’s dead anyway, I was too late.” The doctor walked away. “It doesn’t matter. Let her have him.”

            “Don’t say that, don’t tell me that.” Tears streaked her red cheeks, her eyes bounced frantically around until they caught mine, and I shook my head. At last the cops pulled her off and we wheeled the stretcher into the crash room.

            An intern cracked his chest. “Good call on that tension pneumo,” he said to me as he sliced between the ribs, forcing them open with a jagged vise. The man’s heart was a red, slimy thing. The intern held it between his palms and squeezed, but it wouldn’t beat again. It bulged, red and watery, through the gaps in his fingers. I couldn’t look at the man’s face, once his chest was open like that. He was so tall his feet hung off the end of the stretcher, the blood-filled IV bag lay beside his hip.

            “There’s his aorta, there’s the lung, you can see it’s collapsed.” The intern pointed with one gloved finger. It was easier to look at the man as a bunch of organs. I didn’t want to go back into the driveway where his mother might still be.

            I lingered over my paperwork, and watched one of the medical students sew up the chest. Finally they covered the body with a sheet and I had to leave. When I got outside, the mother was gone, I didn’t know where to, and Rodie was cleaning the floor of the bus with peroxide, a lit cigarette bobbing on his lip.

            “You made a mess,” he said. “Try and be neater next time.”

            The tendons in his face twitched as he mopped with hard, jerky strokes.

            I watched him for a minute. “Do you think I did all right?” I said.

            “He died, what does it matter?”

            He was facing the wall so I couldn’t see his expression.

            “But we couldn’t have saved him.”

            “We could have.” When he turned around, Rodie looked like someone had pulled down a pair of shades behind his eyes.

            “We could have saved him easy. Three years ago, we would have.” He leaned towards me. I could smell the traces of gin from Miss Montalvo’s lingering in his breath. “What that doctor did wasn’t hard. Think I couldn’t have done it out there in front of the projects? We used to do it all the time. Then they decided it was too advanced for us ambulance drivers. Got to leave something for the MDs. So a few black men die, so what.”

            “But you could have done it, then. You could have saved him.”

            “If I wanted to lose my job.”

            “They can’t fire you for that, you’re saving someone.”

            “Men’ve been fired for less.”

            He slammed the door and started to walk to the front.

            I grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute, tell me how to do it.”

            He snorted. “What for?”

            “So I know. Just in case.”

            He shook me loose. “Didn’t you watch that doctor? That’s all you do. Find the rib and go right over it. An idiot could do it. Plenty have.”

           He didn’t talk for the rest of the shift. My knee stung, I wondered if he was telling me the truth, that we could have saved the man. We drove up and down the streets of Harlem, past the rows of black window tenements abandoned as the city’s fortunes plunged, past the chicken joints and café con leche bakeries, men on the corners nodding as women hurried home from shift-work, their arms full of groceries. The night seemed so normal, not the kind of black, scary night someone could be murdered in. Rodie flipped the radio from station to station, all the same words, the same beats. Then the sound of a piano filled the cab, so close I could hear the fingers pounding the keys, and a peeved, leathery voice, half-buried in the tape hiss.

            Well if the house catch on fire, and there ain’t no water round

            Landlady throw that gallon jug out the window, let the shack burn on down

            As we turned the corner, the music dissolved into static. I fiddled with the dial. Stations fluttered past, but whatever we had stumbled on was gone, and it was nothing but Donna Summers as far as the eye could see.

ANNE WALDMAN

I Dreamed I Was in Edwin’s Room

or so it seems by hook or crook

of white frescoed night, it is night you see

& plenty of flights up, a door, push hard

Blanchefleur I wonder

why she’s abounding he’s perfectly gay

you see & the hook is sweet it’s for

the cat got out for kibbles I meant kid-lets

drip sweat, tears bubbling heart out of a dancer

who is speeding up her version of Balanchine

so food replaces trance replaces

sacrifice for solace Edwin may I call you

I yearn for talk & solace may I call upon

your witty solemnity o how untoward

the world seems without it how cruel

& unAsiatic, how cumbersome

& why of all nights this, my wounded

bloody breast? will I arm again in

holistic operations of war theaters

& in the light of such an attention as his

with his minimal mammal things,

only what's needed will I dance thus &

thusly meet his magic cranky mind

and helper Katie puts a spoon there,

just so & there need be no music,

no entertainment for we are in the moon

of his slashing solemnity raw you see

like a mood, though moreso because it is moon-

lit, the wit, the cat, his lying down,

a white-painted shaggy divan, beloved Dante

(book, totem) need I ever be thinking

wooden precipice surrounded by the

angels of secular poetry, could be his mother

if wood could breathe a morsel of hope

in the details of body & sock, or feeding

Katie mostly is him, we are frescoed sisters & really

she is weeping mother for loss of actual

child in real New York time not this

dream Blanchefleur scheme she twists she

turns to drop a blood-tear

in this room of painted floor, angled, Bill deKooning

candy light & slashing mind for the rage

of a fierce aesthete where are they, all the fierce aesthetes!

ubi sunt shunts in his ledge, pull window up

all way, all ghosts chat back in long crooked loft

look over your odd shoulder whither thou goest

now read in unison the palm of Childe Edwin,

yes this is plan is planet is psalm

was how it was in dream, his left palm to be read

it was as if by spirit-choir, Ambrosian

he would go on, live long

I remember such a room like being in Heaven

on a cloud, above a cloud look down

know where everything goes & to

be put away, what sways, what needs dusting

the lines and veins of his hand rested over

his head pale Edwin Den by just lying there asleep

for to honor, mimic, instruct my dream

CLAUDIA GRINNELL

The Necessary Discipline

We should bind the feet, break all the minor bones. Send a bill

From the table to the room in the back. There

We’re all praying together, oh

Please, we need the rain. The drought, so long in the coming:

finally here.

But since it had come

We reasoned it would (come to) pass. We have tried

Understanding. We lack the necessary discipline to stay

In one place. We lack the scruples to say this is good

Enough. We want rain, now, rocks ground to sand. I believe

I stand next to a Sand Cherry tree in one moment of (lapseodic) reverie.

Weeks passed, the phone didn’t ring, snakes

Crawled back and forth between the house and the bushes.

This is gonna take a while. Some took the easy way out:

Shot the elephant, packed up the farm, hastalabyebyebaby. Still,

I believe the tree is still there. And also the wave, after six

Small ones exploding into water and air. If it were to be – 

Asked, I’d leave. I’d join the crusade, go

Looking for artifacts: proof

We’d been there. I’ve tried understanding:

The man’s never home, or at home after six

And drunk, or at home peering through a hole.

TERRI CARRION

Accidental Villanelle

It must have been an accident, Mother,

how I heaved a stone at your head

in our bright back yard. It was Summer

I was only three but already pouty and bothered,

didn’t want your scrambled eggs, flung them at you instead.

It might have been an accident, Mother

When I locked you out of our new Manhattan apartment, like an angry lover.

The Super found me, balled up in a corner, gnawing on a loaf of bread.

My bright back yard was missing and it was Summer.

Remember, when I bit down on the thermometer

and almost swallowed mercury and glass? The Doctor said

it could have been an accident, Mother.

But I know you never did recover

when you caught me shaving my head

in our bright back yard. It was Summer

and I knew, this time I was in trouble.

Later, I ripped the posts off my canopy bed.

It wasn’t an accident Mother,

I lost my virginity in a bright back yard, in Summer.

MICHAEL ROTHENBERG

Red Butterflies

Black boxes on folding chairs

around a folding table

In the Room of Butterflies

four men play cards

smoke, drink, cough, grunt

I put twenty dollars

in front of The Bank, a squinting man

A Jovial Man deals me a hand,

five of a kind, picture cards,

Red Butterflies light on their wings

I bet heavily on this hand

The Bank leans back in his chair,

clicks his tongue, sure I’m bluffing

Maybe I am. I've never had

a flush of Red Butterflies before

He sees me, raises me

The fourth hand, The Drunken Man

flutters his cards, as if

he’s got Butterflies too

He sees the bank. I see the bank

I raise the bank. The bank folds

The Drunk sees me, calls me

I show him my hand of Red Butterflies

He has a pair of aces and

a pair of threes. I reach for the pot

He stops me, slides the money

into his lap, beams around the table,

says, “Close, but no cigar!

Everyone knows, two pair

beats five Butterflies”

A game of Red Butterflies

folded and unfolded

DONALD GURAVICH

Paper and Rocks

I was in Lebanon when the war was going on. My closest

friend was a jeweler in Beirut and where he had his store

there was a whole row of jewelry stores. That’s where they

had been fighting for three days. So then they decided that

they would have a short ceasefire to deal with the bodies.

And there were bodies everywhere. Bodies in the streets all

bloated up with the heat, you see. Some with no arms, no

heads. And my friend wants to go to his store because he has

all his money and jewels locked up in his safe. You

can still hear the fighting in the next section of town. He

really wants to go, so we go out into the streets and they

are piling up the dead bodies and burning them with rubber

tires. We are wearing handkerchiefs on our faces but I can

still smell that smell of humans burning. And all around his

store, the other ones have been bombed, or looted, all the

glass broken and everything taken by the soldiers. But in

his store, there’s the safe, unopened. So he opens it, and

we stuff the money and jewels into our shirts and pants and

by now the fighting is moving closer, so we have to go up the

back streets and around the sounds and we get back to his

place.

     I’ve thought about that for a long time now. It was a

stupid thing to do, what we did. We could have been killed.

For what? Some paper and some rocks. Some paper. And some

rocks.

TONY GUZMAN

Whenever I Stop

whenever I stop my hair runs

into fire engine chaos

     so I sleep

     without fear of

          waking

yet, I do not crawl

to savage splendor

          I stand

although my stance asks

          the question

JAMES DENBOER

Cat Sleeping One Eye Open Counting Stars. Italy, 1996.

Tortoise-shell, on a chocolate-colored cushion in a blue wicker chair by the wide window in the thick wall, open to the night sky, big moon, bright Venus. Each night, like now, cat counts the stars; that is, keeps them in right order and place. The counting of stars is counting the syllables we must put in line on the way to a whole. Moth bops the windowpane. Cat counts that as counting for something, in its tiny mind, one eye still open on the image in the Swedish rug. We too believe that that is what holds up the sky, even with odd clouds – that is what holds it all together, counting back to the source, to Zero: “… the number which belongs to the concept not identical with itself.” Think seriously about counting the stars from your cushion by the window from then on.

Mad Love Interview

Francesco LoCastro: Dualistic Vision

By Tony Guzman

Associate Editor

25-year-old Francesco LoCastro was born in Sicily and grew up in Stuttgart, Germany where he drew for his high school newspaper. His family moved to Ft. Lauderdale when he was 16 and, after getting a BFA from Florida Atlantic University, LoCastro got a job with a commercial art studio doing murals and “Disney stuff.” His style, which merges elements of cartoon drawing and realistic painting, has been dubbed “cartoon surrealism,” and LoCastro sees himself as working in the context of a “dualistic theory” which seeks to convey complexity and promote discourse by intruding humorous cartoon-derived elements into the depiction of serious, even disturbing themes – or vice versa.   

“It was a good idea to explore art for art’s sake, but we’re beyond that now. We’ve got to see art as a message or vehicle.”

It sounds like you were compelled to draw from an early age. Do you think artists are born, or nurtured?

Both points are valid. Obviously I think talent is innate and, yes, there’s also a point in everybody’s life when something is triggered. I met some people who made me think: I can do this for money; I can do it as a career and not be looked down on for it. I’d been doing my art in isolation and hiding because I was faced by my surroundings telling me: Don’t think of it as a job. Environment can suffocate you, but if anyone that has talent goes with it, it will always happen, and if you’re passionate about it success follows and I’ve been doing well ever since.

Crazy M F

“Doing well,” how you define that?

It’s a mix. Doing well is a mix of being able to support yourself with what you do and happiness; and my happiness comes when I feel that every day I go forward, that I’m not stagnating.

How do you know that you’re going forward?

There’s a lot of things, a lot of factors: appreciation from your peers, sales of artwork, people calling you to do interviews, the amount of exhibits during the year. For me, the amount of exhibits every year has increased and that means there’s more interest.

Something that I found interesting as you went over your signs of progress: I assumed or expected that your criteria would be more internal…

I could have added that – and it’s very important – but just the fact that you feel you’re getting better is not enough, because it’s a business. That’s what a lot of artists don’t understand.

Meanwhile in Tokyo

Do you have some sort of inner barometer, though, relating emotionally to how your artistic process is evolving and progressing?

There’s a quote by Fellini. He said you can’t leave an artist alone with his inner barometer because artists are lazy people. If you leave an artist to wait for his inspiration, the artist wastes precious time.

So you don’t at all buy into the model of the artist as someone hypersensitive whose process has to be coddled. You seem very business-like in your approach.

A certain amount of external pressure is needed for the artist to move along. Without pressure it’s no fun. Deadlines are important. I don’t want to come across as being superficial about it, but it is work. It’s also a passion and a pleasure and a great thing, but it’s not enough to be a talent and be good anymore. You have to be a salesman; you have to be an entertainer and all of the above.

Moses for President

The artist as salesman, as entertainer, goes back to Warhol?

It goes back to the society we live in, a world of competition. That’s good and bad, but you have to get accustomed to it to be known, to move forward. We’re all products of our environment, ultimately. 

Historically speaking, do you think that there were other times and cultures that were more amenable to the creation of quality art?

I think that any time and any space is an equal to me. Human art and human talent can thrive in any time. No period of time is better or worse than another. We made pyramids. We made skyscrapers. They all contain a form of beauty.

What about conditions of, say, intense political repression, like Hitler’s persecution of so-called “degenerate” art, or society breaking down into chaos. Wouldn’t that have an impact on the ability to create art.

Some artists need that. Some artists thrive under chaos, under conditions of stress. Art can be created under any conditions. Look at “Guernica.”

Lower Your Standards

But Picasso was living in comfort in Paris when he painted “Guernica.”

Still, the Nazis destroyed some of his work. Some artists inflict torture on themselves – look at Van Gogh – in order to feel something and put it down. Even in a state of war and chaos, no society has been able to suppress art. Destruction has bred creation.

How did your dualistic theory evolve?

First, I want to be clear: it’s not hovering above my head as a motto that all my pieces have to have this theory. It evolved over time. It’s been going on basically my whole life as an artist. My predominant influence has been cartoon art. Cartoons totally inspired me.

What about cartoons totally inspired you?

I grew up with cartoons. Not too many generations can say that. There are certain things you can achieve with cartoons. You can make the eyes bigger. That you can exaggerate human emotions always fascinated me. Caricaturing always fascinated me. It brought out the best and worst in people.

So you can amplify the emotional palette?

It’s more a factor of being influenced in terms of a duality. Something can appear friendly, but the other side is a somber, serious message; even something shocking. That’s how the theory came about: how something can appear “nice” but have a serious intention; how you can express something serious, but there’s humor.

You’ve said you want to provoke a discourse. A discourse about what?

About any issue that I put into the message. I want people who like what they’re seeing to discuss it with people who don’t like it.

What’s the value of discourse like that?

That both opposites can walk away learning something from each other, because I think one of our greatest problems today is that people of different backgrounds and interests don’t want to relate to each other anymore. We only create understanding when we know what our opponents are feeling and thinking… and maybe we learn from it; because it’s never black and white. There’s good and bad in everything we see.

I want to at least touch on the formal element in art. How does that factor into your process?

It’s just as important. In the end all I care about is how it looks. Discourse and all that is really great, but on top of it all have to draw the audience in with a visual component they find fascinating.

So art is a means to something else.

Absolutely. What you have to understand is that formalist art is a movement that’s been dead for a long, long time. Art is such a valuable remedy, a means to help find solutions. It was a good idea to explore art for art’s sake, but we’re beyond that now. We’ve got to see art as a message or vehicle. It can teach you everything. That’s been its role in history. It’s taught me everything I know.

What do you most know thanks to art?

That’s a tough one.

Or see as most important?

The main thing is that I’ve found the reason that I was put on this planet, my calling. I found the thing that’s worthwhile, for me, and that’s true happiness. You can put me in a prison; I’ll still be creating something.

Mad Love Contributors

TERRI CARRION

Terri was conceived in Venezuela, born in New York, raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Hollywood, Florida. She is assistant editor for Big Bridge magazine online (BigBridge.org). Other poems have or will appear in Vox, Slipstream, Pearl, Mangrove, Hanging Loose, The Cream City Review, Penumbra, Paper Tiger, Tigertail and online at BigBridge.org, Jackmagazine.com, Poeticinhalation.com and Mipoesia.com.

JAMES DENBOER

James is a Sacramento bookseller and poet. His books include Learning the Way and Trying to Come Apart (University of Pittsburgh Press), Lost in Blue Canyon (Christopher’s Books, Santa Barbara) and Dreaming of the Chinese Army (Blue Thunder Press). He has won grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the National Arts Council, the Carnegie Fund for Authors, the Authors’ League of America, PEN/New York, and other institutions. 

MAGGIE DUBRIS

Maggie is a writer and musician who lives in New York City. She worked for many years as a 911 paramedic, and is the author of Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press, 2002) and Skels, which has just been released by Soft Skull Press. Her website is www.maggiedubris.com.

CLAUDIA GRINNELL

Claudia was born and raised in Germany. She now makes her home in Louisiana, where she teaches English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Her poems have appeared in various print and ezines, most recently in such places as Exquisite Corpse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Mudlark, Janus Head, Recursive Angel and Blue Moon Review.

DONALD GURAVICH

Donald was born in 1948 on Deer Island, in New Brunswick, Canada. He attended Mount Allison University where he majored in English and Art History. He’s traveled extensively in Mexico and is a frequent guest faculty of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He lives in a small coastal community in Northern California. His books include Triggers, Snapshots (with Ken Botto and Franco Beltrametti), 8-Ball (with Jack Collom), and Both Gone (with Stefan Hyner).

TONY GUZMAN

A graduate of Queens College, New York and the University of Chicago, Tony is the Associate Editor of the Miami SunPost and its Critic at Large. Recent work has appeared in Big Bridge and poetic inhalation.

MICHAEL HETTICH

Michael has published ten books and chapbooks, most recently Behind Our Memories and Stationary Wind. He teaches at Miami Dade College.

JEROME ROTHENBERG

Jerome’s A Book of Witness, his twelfth book of poems from New Directions, was published in spring of 2003. His latest assemblages are Poems for the Millennium, co-edited with Pierre Joris, and A Book of the Book, co-edited with Steven Clay. He and Joris are co-editors of the new series, Poets for the Millennium, from the University of California Press, the first two volumes of which (María Sabina and André Breton) have just been published.

MICHAEL ROTHENBERG

Born in Miami Beach, Michael is a poet and songwriter with a B.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Poetics from New College of California. He has published several books of poems including Favorite Songs, Nightmare of the Violins, What the Fish Saw, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum) and a novel, Punk Rockwell (Tropical Press).  He is the editor of the Internet literary review Big Bridge at www.bigbridge.org.

ANNE WALDMAN

Anne is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost cultural, poetic, spiritual, and political voices in America. Together with Allen Ginsberg, she founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetic. The author of over forty books, she has collaborated with visual artists, filmmakers, composers, dancers, and musicians. Her recent major collection is In the Room of Never Grieve, New and Selected Poems 1985-2003 (Coffee House Press). Anne lives in Boulder, Colorado and New York City.