Our website is being redesigned & rebuilt, just in time for a year of stellar books! Internationally acclaimed prose poet, Robert Gibbons, National Book Award finalist, William Heyen, and an incredible interview with legendary avant-garde artist, composer, and philosopher, John Cage, which is scheduled to be published on his 100th birthday, September 5th.

• Traveling Companion, by Robert Gibbons
  “A whole lost America emerges in this book, as it does in This Time. It is in writing like his — like Kerouac’s or Olson’s, or Williams’ Paterson — that we will go to re-possess ourselves of what we’ve allowed to be taken so shamelessly from us.” writes Peter Anastas, author of Decline of Fishes
• Hiroshima Suite, by William Heyen
  National Book Award finalist and author of more than 30 books, William Heyen is “a remarkable poet in whom the ‘visionary’ and the unblinkingly ‘historical’ are dramatically meshed. He writes with the wild, radiant audacity of the visionary; yet his eye and ear are sharp, unsparing.” -Joyce Carol Oates
• 120’00”: An Interview with John Cage, by Larry Fader; Foreword by Robert Thurman; Art by John Cage
  A previously unpublished interview from 1976 with the legendary avant-garde composer, philosopher, poet, and artist, John Cage discusses the influences of Zen Buddhism, by way of D.T. Suzuki, in his music, art, and approach to life with Dr. Larry Fader. Foreword by Robert Thurman, Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and close friend and former student of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

OMPHALOS 14 - the final issue

Featuring nine photographs by Cheryl Fallon, an interview with the legendary John Cage, poetry by National Book Award finalist William Heyen, internationally acclaimed prose poet Robert Gibbons, esteemed New England poet Richard Hoffman, emerging Maine poet James Day Leavitt, also Maggie Belisle, Heather Adams, Richard Taylor, Leah C. Stetson, Nancy Jean Hill, and Daniel Affsprung, plus fiction by Ed Hamilton

i12bent:

Lovers and fighters tonite:

Gregory Corso, underrated Beat poet: died this day in 2001, aged 70, from prostate cancer…

“If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved.” — Gregory Corso

Photo by Elsa Dorfman of Corso and Ginsberg at her house…

Port Chester to become the best of the best…again!

‎”I think that it is the most beautiful book done in Maine this year… really a lovely book — needs to be read, held, talked about.” -Gary Lawless, Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick, [just down the road from Hawthorne’s Bowdoin College]

Buy on Amazon

i12bent:

Birthday of Louis Daguerre, inventor of one of the first successful photographic processes: Nov. 18, 1787 - 1851…

Photo: E. Thiesson, 1844

Ken Kesey (Sep 17, 1935 - Nov 10, 2001)

The Needle
by Ken Kesey

First, brothers and sisters and spirits of our sphere,
I wish to make one thing perfectly clear;
During these last ten turnings of a year
I have been
Jacked-up, jerked-off, brought down, strung-out,
And I’ve
Holed up, come on, cooled off and hung out,
And I’ve
Rushed and flashed and flushed and twitched
And I’ve
Sniveled and snorted and bellowed and bitched
And I’ve
Been spaced out atoms in the heartless void
And a slightly-plotted tightly-knotted paranoid,
I’ve watched friends grin goodby as I spiraled down the drain?
I’ve had doctors shake their fingers at the fungus on my brain;
And I have called, friends and doctors, oh I have roared out my soul
From the compass busting bottom of the false magnetic pole,
But it was a place beyond friends or medicine’s reach—
A senseless 3-D cry from a binary breach—
And the heartless void can listen but doesn’t seem to care
And my call was never answered until the needle turned to prayer.