Credits
EditorsMary Sands was born in Louisville, Kentucky, raised in the Midwest, and currently lives with her daughter near Laguna Beach, California, where she likes nothing better than to sit seaside at the quaint Village Café and drink a cold Corona with lime on a hot day. She digs Laguna, and has a penchant for listening to hobo saxophone players on lonely corners. She is a graduate of Purdue University, with degrees in English and anthropology. Outside of JACK Magazine, and her "real" job as a technical writer, she is the contributing editor and webmaster of Big Bridge. She designs, researches for, and writes for Beat Generation News, which has bios of the beat generation women and men and articles about rucksacking, philosophy, beat art, and jazz as well as a "Kerouac Menu". Her interests include the great outdoors, ecology, cultural anthropology, beat literature, and renaissance movements. She likes to hike in the mountains and hang out at the beach; someday she will surf better. She is most inspired by the life-long works of Gary Snyder and lists The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, and Dance of the Coyote, by Bill Hotchkiss, as her traditional favorite novels. The best thing she's read recently is a book by Allan Weisbecker titled In Search of Captain Zero. A review of that book can be found here. Her favorite authors include Robinson Jeffers (which prompted a Carmel trip a couple years ago) and John Steinbeck (whose statue still graces Cannery Row). Her musical and film tastes have always been eclectic, including everything from Sinatra to Coltrane and from Dead Kennedys to 1910 Fruitgum Company--as well, she loves David Lynch, Ed Wood, and Russ Meyer films. Cheesy things and serious things balance her appeal for the arts. Mary has published articles/reviews in Rain Taxi, The Kerouac Connection, and Kerouac Rag. More about Mary can be found at her Beat News website.
Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor and also co-founder of Big Bridge Press and Big Bridge, a webzine of poetry and everything else. His poems have appeared in many journals including 2river View, Beehive, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bolinas Heresay News, Blue Book, Cafe Review, The Cortland Review, The Duct Tape Press, Exquisite Corpse, Ironwood, Jacket, Isibongo, Lungfull!, Limestone Magazine, Light and Dust@Grist Mobile Anthology of Poetry, Lynx: Poetry From Bath, Melic Review, Moveo Angelus, Mudlark, Mungo vs Ranger, Octavo, Pearl, The Poetry Kit, Prosodia, Pyrowords, Riding The Meridian, Rolling Stock, Southern Ocean Review, Sycamore Review, Ygdrasil, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly Online and Zyzzyva. He has published several poetry books: What The Fish Saw (Twowindows Press, CA, 1984), Nightmare Of The Violins (Twowindows Press, CA, 1986), Man/Woman (Big Bridge Press, CA, 1988), Favorite Songs (Big Bridge Press, CA, 1990), Lindsay's Book (Big Bridge Press, CA, 1999), and The Paris Journals (Fish Drum, Inc. 2000). His first book of poems, What The Fish Saw, was awarded The Rounce and Coffin Award. His broadside Elegy for The Dusky Seaside Sparrow was selected Broadside of the Year by Fine Print Magazine. His poem Angels was produced as broadside in limited edition by Hatch Show Prints as part of the museum resources of The Country Music Foundation. His poetry books and broadsides are archived at the University of Francisco, and are held in the Special Collection libraries of Brown University, Claremont Colleges, University of Kansas, the New York Public Library, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, and UC-Santa Cruz. His songs have appeared in Hollywood Pictures' Shadowhunter and Black Day, Blue Night, and most recently, TriStar Pictures' Outer Ozona. Other songs have been recorded on CDs including: "The Darkest Part of The Night" by Bob Malone, "Difficult Woman" by Renee Geyer, "Global Blues Deficit" by Cody Palance, "The Woodys" by The Woodys, and a soon to be released CD by Johnny Lee Schell. He is most recently editor of Overtime: Selected Poems of Philip Whalen (Viking Penguin, 1999). His novel Punk Rockwell was published by Tropical Press, and his The Paris Journals was published by Fish Drum, Inc., in 2000. He will also be editor of the Selected Poems by Joanne Kyger, due out with Penguin 2002.
Guest Editor
Hammond Guthrie—Writer/nonobjective-abstractionist painter (Vorpal Gallery S.F.) lives in Portland, Oregon, where he recently completed a book of memoirs: AsEverWas (A Self-Descriptive Biopathy), from which the vignette "Laguna - Hollywood Transition" is taken. Over the years, and in various locales around the world, Hammond has been an acquaintance if not outright co-conspirator with numerous Beat/Neo-Beat artists and brave experimentalists, including Philo Farnsworth III, son of the man who invented television; Del Close, the late Director of Second City and Committee theaters; "Hube the Cube" Leslie; Allen Ginsberg; William Burroughs; John "Hoppy" Hopkins of the Arts Lab in London; and Jasper Grootvelt, mentor for the Dutch Provo activist group—to name a few. Currently he is at work on a second volume of vignettes: Biopathic Tendencies: (1976-1992). You may write to Hammond at writenow@spiritone.com.
Art
Chris Oller: I was born in May 1959 in Louisiana and grew up in Texas. Graduated from North Texas State University in 1982 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing. First exposed to Beat Literature after taking an upper level English class in college called "The Songs of Bob Dylan" where I would hear references to Ginsberg, Kerouac, et al. Got fully hooked on Kerouac about four years ago after first reading The Dharma Bums. Travelled to San Francisco this summer to read Chapter 13 at the Big Sur Marathon reading at Washington Square Park. Currently resides in Denton, Texas.
Anita Savary: Click here for bio.
George Wallace, is editor of Long Island Quarterly, Poetrybay, and creator of the landmark Jack Kerouac Big Sur Marathon reading in San Francisco, Lowell, Orlando and New York. More about George.
Letters to the Editor
Frank Parker combined his crafts of printing and writing to publish his first book, Heart Shaped Blossoms, and has since become active in electronic publishing, i.e., Frank’s Home: An Active Poetry Anthology. His poem “Wild with Spring” won a prize in Quarry West 35/36: Poets and Writers of the Monterey Bay, edited by Ken Weisner, judged by Francisco X. Alarcón, in the Spring of 2000. Preferring to work and live quietly, he resides in Monterey, California. Time permitting, he enjoys hiking and backpacking the coastal and High Sierra mountains of California, USA.
Features
Veteran performance artist, bandleader and writer Jason Eisenberg has appeared in many incarnations with his outrageous proto-happenings, spoken-word whammys, re-creations of Lord Buckley's Hipsemantic lovebombs and Jack Kerouac's writ blues. He has engaged and enraged audiences at New York's Bitter End, the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Cambridge's venerable Club Passim. Not sold in stores.
S.A. Griffin is a crash vampire living in Los Angeles. He is the co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and recently released his third volume of poetry, Unborn Again, from Phony Lid Books.
Angus MacLise (bio is at Beat Generation News).
James Stauffer is a poet, beat aficionado and recluse about town, based in Berkeley, frequently seen in San Francisco's Mission District. Born a third-generation northern Californian, he has spent a lifetime in recovery from literary scholarship the at University of California, Riverside working as a ranch hand, tree planter, salesman, bartender and web jockey among his legal gigs. He lurks on the web and frequents a few Internet beat dens. His work has appeared in Night, Beat Scene, Sic, The Fool, and Butcher's Block. He was co-editor of The Fool, and is a contributing editor to Polarity. A fan of experimental music and electronica, he also plays with unsold screenplays and a project on Lew Welch. If he had a bumper sticker, it would say "Just Say Yes."
Eco-Watch
Jerry Martien has been a community poet and activist in the Humboldt Bay region for thirty years. For the past decade he and his neighbors have struggled to preserve and restore the coastal dunes where he lives. He has read his poems throughout northern California—in country saloons and city bars, at civic celebrations, public meetings and back-country gatherings. His poetry has been published in broadsides and chapbooks and bioregional journals and in the anthologies Poems for the Wild Earth and The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. The book-length collection, Pieces in Place, brings together the poems of Martien’s apprenticeship to place, to poetry and carpentry, and to human relations. He has also written a history of economic exchange, Shell Game: A True Account Of Beads And Money In North America. After working as a carpenter for 20 years, for the past five years he has taught creative writing and nature writing at Humboldt State University. He is currently completing two collections of poetry and a book about the caretaking of people and land.
Susan Smith Nash began her advanced education as a geologist, doing extensive field work in Bolivia. This gave her an impression of the land in what may seem a comically literal sense--and it also gave her the opportunity to polish her abilities with Spanish dialects and bring her into contact with the Native American peoples of the region. Moving her area of study to comparative literature and her exploration of Latin America to Paraguay, she assembled the first anthology of Paraguayan women poets ever gathered inside or outside Paraguay. An English version of this anthology now appears on the World Wide Web. Nash currently works at the University of Oklahoma. Well aware of the vacillating fortunes in oil and agriculture, she also works with international programs to aid countries such as Azerbaijan, Russia, and Uzbekistan in finding solutions to imbalances brought about by exploitation of oil and mineral resources. She is also heavily involved in technology transfer and educational initiatives to help global communities develop human resources. Her early work as a writer dealt with charismatic dictators and doomsday cults. In all her areas of endeavor, she explores the new order of global interconnectedness in which many long-held assumptions have become obsolete.
Laurie Stone is author of the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday, 1990), the memoir collection Close to the Bone (Grove, 1997), and Laughing in the Dark (Ecco, 1997), a collection of her writing on comic performance. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, she has been theater critic for The Nation, critic-at-large on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, a member of The Bat Theater Company, and a regular writer for Ms., New York Woman, and Viva. She has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kittredge Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and in 1996 won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. She has published many memoiristic essays in such publications as Ms., TriQuarterly, and Creative Nonfiction. Her current short fiction appears in the anthologies Full Frontal Fiction (Crown, 2000) and Money, Honey (Deutscher Tashenbuch Verlag, 2000), and her reviews can be seen in the L.A. Times, The Washington Post, and Newsday. She has given readings in dozens of venues, including The 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, Barnes & Noble, KGB, The National Arts Club, and The New School. In fall 2000 she served as Writer-in Residence at Pratt Institute and at Old Dominion University, and she conducted workshops in the graduate theater and creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2001 she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts of $7,000 in the category of Nonfiction Literature. She currently serves on the faculty of Antioch's MFA program, and in 2002 she will be Journalist-in-Residence at Thurber House and teach at the Paris Writers Workshop.
Essays
William Slaughter edits and publishes Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics. His own books of poems and essays are The Politics of My Heart and Untold Stories. Links to his e-writing can be found on his personal home page. He teaches at the University of North Florida. E-mail: wrs@unf.edu.
Mark Spitzer swamps Cajunly downsouth avec Exquisite Corpse (Asst. Ed. of) translating Rimbaud, Celine, Bataille, Cendrars & coughing up novels like Chum and Bottom Feeder on yr Amazon.com dial.
Fiction/Nonfiction
Peter Coyote. Click here for bio.
Valery Oisteanu is a writer and artist with international flavor. Born in Russia (1943) and educated in Romania. He adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. Emigrating to New York City in 1972, he has been writing in English for the past 28 years. He is the author of 10 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays in progress. As a collagist he was featured in John Digby's "Collage Handbook" published by Thames & Hudson. He has exhibited in New York and abroad. His work is in many international permanent collections. He often illustrates his writings with Surrealist collages. As a performer VO is well known to downtown NYC audiences, performing every season with the exception of the summer, when he goes on tour abroad. He is always well received in theaters and clubs specializing in poetry and music where he presents original Zen Dada performances in his unmistakable style "Jazzoetry." As a photographer he specializes in portraits of famous literati's and artists such as Borges, Bowles, Ionesco, Paz, Warhol, Raushenberg etc. As a video documentarian he wrote produced and filmed a five part documentary for European TV called "Rhythms and Rituals in Bali."
Path
Poetry
John Aiello has written extensively on the Beat Generation since 1988. Aside from his work as a journalist, Aiello has written some 15,000 poems. Working mostly in pocket notebooks, Aiello blends the short lines of William Carlos Williams with the word fever of the late Jack Kerouac. "Writing is truly a sacred practice," Aiello once wrote in an essay. "The blank page like an altar like a new-born planet of infinite dimension. Images at once grow wings and twist into 'sound', perfect and sleek, moving through the holy mysteries of the eye. A truly sacred practice that, in the end, has defied all practical explanation." Presently, Aiello is adapting a newspaper article he wrote about the murder of his paternal grandfather into a feature film script. Aiello has worked on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle since 1987.
James Brook is a poet, translator, and editor. A veteran of the recent antidisplacement battles in San Francisco, he is an editor for City Lights Books, where he concentrates on political nonfiction and world literature. He is the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life and Reclaiming San Francisco. He has translated works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, Benjamin Péret, Alberto Savinio, and Sebastian Reichmann. His poems and essays have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, City Lights Review, Mudlark, Gare Du Nord, Science as Culture, Pharos, Blind Date, and elsewhere.
Ray Clark Dickson, born 1919, Portland, Oregon, was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. After serving as a Marine captain, WWII, south Pacific, he lived a year in Mexico writing pulp fiction novels and narrative poetry. In the early 50's he was with Jack Kerouac and other expatriate American writers in Mexico City. RCD was a University of Oregon track star, sailor, soldier, jazz drummer, adventurer--published hundreds of poems in small litzines as well as major productions such as The Beloit Poetry Journal's current 2000, A FINE EXCESS: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal. In the last 12 years Ray has 22 published in the BPJ. He chronicles the last century in his new poetry retrospective, Parlando (ISBN 0-615-11586-1), The Kerouac Connection Press, 295-pg quality paperback, $l4.95.
Ronnie Donn has his Masters in English Liberal Arts, and works in the Young Adult Department of the Ouachita Parish Public Library, Main Branch, in Monroe, Louisiana. He is on the masthead of Turnrow, a literary magazine that can be sampled at http://turnrow.ulm.edu. Birds like him, as do the fish of the sea. Hugo Ball would consider him very likable.
Claudia K. Grinnell was born and raised in Germany. She now makes her home in Louisiana, where she teaches at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Her poems have appeared in various print and ezines, most recently in such places at Exquisite Corpse, Hayden's Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Mudlark, and Blue Moon Review. You may reach Claudia at grinnell@spock.ulm.edu. Click here for her home page.
Noah Hoffenberg. Publication Credits: Alicubi Journal, The American Dissident, American Tanka, The Anthology of South Shore Poets, The Bennington Banner, Bibliophilos, The Black Spring Review, The Blue Review, The Coal City Review, Dialtone, 4th Street, Friction Magazine, The Great Swamp Gazette, The GSU Review, The Horsethief's Journal, The Iconoclast, Japanophile, Lynx, The Neovictorian, Poems Niederngasse, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Motel, Raskolnikov's Cellar, Reflections, Still, Temper 1992, Temper 1993, Troubadour 2000/2001 Best Rhyming Poetry, The Tucumcari Review and WangZen. Other Credits: Semi-finalist for the 2001 Tupelo Press $1,000 chapbook competition. Two-time winner of the Umass Dartmouth Literary Society Poetry Competition.
Tony Hoffman studied literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan, and has recently taken classes at the St. Marks Poetry Project. His work has appeared in many print and online publications, including New Observations, Tripwire (Asterius Press), Storie, Tucumcari Literary Review, and The True Wheel, Poetry Life & Times, and Poets & Poems (the webzine of the Poetry Project, at www.poetryproject.com ). Tony also writes nonfiction articles about business and science. He is particularly interested in the often uneasy relationship between technology, the human psyche, and the natural world. His monthly astronomy column, written for the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York, can (sometimes) be seen at http://www.aaa.org/eyepiece/current/. Tony can be reached at Tony.Hoffman@worldnet.att.net.
John Roche lives on Conesus Lake in the hamlet of Conesus, NY, and currently teaches English at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is a faculty advisor, along with Sam Abrams, for the student literary magazine Signatures. He has a Ph.D. from SUNY/Buffalo, where he worked with Robert Creeley and the late John C. Clarke on a dissertation exploring affinities between Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright. While teaching at Michigan State University for a number of years, John organized on-campus poetry readings and coordinated and emceed the reading series at the Archives Bookshop in East Lansing. He has published a number of poetry related essays and articles, has published his own poems in magazines like intent, Rolling Stock, Buff, MidWest Miscellany, and The Burning World, and has a chapbook titled Ground Effects. He is currently completing a collection of lake poems to be titled On Conesus.
Jayne Lyn Stahl currently resides on planet earth, although she'd consider a better offer. Her work has
appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Exquisite Corpse, City Lights Review: 2, Beatitude: 33, The New York Quarterly, The Jacaranda Review, STIFFEST OF THE CORPSE (a City Lights Publication), Pulpsmith, LA WOMAN (a German anthology), Earth's Daughters, Sic: Vice & Verse, JACK, among many others. She is the author of Blue Herring, a play about Rimbaud & Verlaine, which had staged readings in New York and Los Angeles.Jeff Swanson: Bringing words from Heaven to your table. Channeling thought-organisms into a flesh of words. Drilling for artesian inspiration in the subterranean screw machine, designed by artisans of the 1880's. Giving word-clothing to the naked mindlings crowding around, skinny immigrants after the ships of dreams are gone each morning. Web: www.wordlings.com.
In the late 1960s, Joel Weishaus was the Literary Editor of UC Berkeley's student newspaper, The Daily Californian. In 1971, he edited the now legendary, On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (City Lights Books). The same year Clifford Burke's Cranium Press published his Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Block Prints by Arthur Okamura. During the 1980s, Weishaus was an Adjunct Curator at The University of New Mexico's Fine Arts Museum, then a Writer-in-Residence at UNM's Center for Southwest Research. Currently living in Portland Oregon, where he is an advisor on web-specific writing at Portland State University's Center for Excellence in Writing, Weishaus continues to write and publish widely. His homepage is: http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282.
Politics
Andrei Codrescu has published poetry, memoirs, fiction, and essays. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio, and has written and starred in the Peabody Award-winning movie, Road Scholar. His novels, The Blood Countess (1995) and Messiah (1999) were national bestsellers. Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1997, was published by Black Sparrow Press. Among his other books are The Hole in the Flag: An Exile’s Tale of Return and Revolution, about the dramatic collapse of Romania’s dictatorship in 1989; Ay, Cuba: a Socio-Erotic Journey, a travelogue of contemporary Cuba; and Hail, Babylon: Looking at American Cities. Mr. Codrescu is MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and edits Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Letters & Life.
Tony Trigilio: Tony's poems have been published in many journals, including recent and forthcoming poetry in The Beloit Poetry Journal and The Iowa Review, and in A Gathering of Poets, a volume commemorating the students killed at Kent State and Jackson State. His book, "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg, was published this year by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. He has published articles and book reviews on Beat literature, multiethnic literature, and twentieth-century poetry in journals such as American Literature, Modern Language Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. He also is a musician (percussion and banjo) whose performances and recordings have included tapevoice collage and spoken word. He toured the United States in 1991 with the band Drumming On Glass. He is the co-founder of The Starve Site, an evolving home for performance art, literature, music, video, human rights activism, and socially engaged Buddhism. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches in the English Department Poetry Program at Columbia College Chicago.
Renaissance History
Philomene Long: Click here for bibliography.
Reviews
Adrien Begrand has written articles for Beat News and The Kerouac Quarterly. He lives in Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, Canada, and rants about all things trivial at http://abegrand.pitas.com.
Jesse Glass: Jesse Glass has lived in Japan for eight years. His poetry, prose and performance work has appeared in Hambone, Angel Exhaust, and Shearsman. His books include Song to Arepo, Against The Agony of Matter, The Book of Doll, and Make Death Die, all available from Revanche-Hoya Publications His website is http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html.
Road
Murat Nemet-Nejat: Click here for bio.
RhondaK, a devoted disciple of Oscar Wilde's excesses, is often accused of being intimidating but blames it on others people's failure to honor Wilde's teachings, such as, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." When not working as Co-editor of NakedPoetry.com, she labors as a librarian and often wakes up with impressions of books temporarily scarring her flesh. The last book she slept with was Radzinsky's The Rasputin File. She is very, very promiscuous with literature.
Tea-Party
Dan Barth lives in northern California with his wife and son. He has written for a variety of publications from Ant Farm to Zambomba. Like Muhammad Ali, Hunter Thompson, Wes Unseld, Helen Humes, and Mary Sands he is originally from Louisville, Kentucky.
Richard Kostelanetz: Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, and Britannica.com, among other selective directories. Living in New York, where he was born, he still needs $1.50 (US) to take a subway. Here's his website.
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