<yrsm contributors>

Beach, James : Capricorn, 37. Into: camping, cards, chess, history, live music, meditation, philosophy, politics, sports, the theatre, travel. Also: studying literature, noticing art, doing stuff. Scoring is a prerequisite?! Published in little venues, worldwide.

Bellamy, Joe David : Lives in Florida. His two latest books are New World Extra and The Lost Saranac Interviews, the latter co-edited with Connie Bellamy. The books are available through his website: joedavidbellamy.com.

Berge, Carol : Artist-poet, editor, neo-prof, writer. A New Yorker, a day-tripper who in the 1960s bitched to Allen Ginsberg, of "Howl" fame, about how everybody dropping in was disrupting her writing (---his response: Shut Your Door). What more to say? She's archived at universities, in textbooks, online. A new story, "We Are Not Alone," is in Gargoyle 54. For more info: carolberge.com. RiP.

Chester, Laura : She has published many volumes of poetry, prose and non-fiction. Most recently, Rancho Weirdo, a collection of short stories, dark humor from Bootstrap Press, and two YA novels, Hiding Glory and Marvel the Marvelous from Willow Creek. Holy Personal, looking for small private places of worship, was made available from Indiana University Press, and a selection of prose-poems, Sparks, was published by The Figures. Both books include extensive photographs by Donna DeMari. Station Hill Press released an updated version of Lupus Novice, an account of Chester’s personal struggle and breakthrough with the auto-immune disease SLE, while Black Sparrow Press published three of Chester’s early books of fiction. Other novels include The Story of the Lake, Faber & Faber; and Kingdom Come, Creative Arts Book Company. Chester has edited six important literary anthologies, including Deep Down and The Unmade Bed. Most recently, Eros & Equus, a passion for the horse, and Heartbeat for Horses, both with photographs from DeMari, are available from Willow Creek Press. Having grown up in Wisconsin, lived in Albuquerque, Paris, and Berkeley, she now travels between Patagonia, Arizona and the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Corner, Philip : He became interested in calligraphy during military service in Korea in 1960-1961 and studied it with Ki-sung Kim; it is often incorporated into his scores. While there he became enamored with Korean traditional music, particularly the jeongak composition Sujecheon, which he describes as "the most beautiful piece of music in the history of the world." Many of his scores are open-ended in that some elements are specified, but others are left partially or entirely to the discretion of the performers. Some employ standard notation, whereas others are graphic scores, text scores, etc. His music also frequently explores unintentional sound, chance activities, minimalism, and non-Western instruments and tuning systems. Improvisation is important, though not exclusive; some "performance proposals" lead to a kind of ecstatic semi-trance. Contact with artists in other media, especially dance and the visual arts, as well as a long-standing interest in Eastern religions such as Buddhism (Zen) and study of the music of composers from the Baroque and Pre-Baroque eras has likewise impacted his music.

In addition to his work as a composer and musician, he has created numerous assemblages, calligraphy, collages, drawings, and paintings, many of which have been exhibited internationally. He has also written much poetry, which like some of his music, has occasionally appeared under his Korean pseudonym Gwan Pok, meaning "Contemplating Waterfall". Editions in silk-screen have been brought out by the Archivio F. Conz, Verona, and Pari e Dispari Agency in Reggio Emilia, among others. Works are regularly exhibited in galleries, mostly in Europe, and are in notable museum collections. His principle gallery is UnimediaModern in Genova, whose director Caterina Gualco maintains a large collection. Other important collectors are Hermann Braun in Germany (deceased 2009) and Luigi Bonotto in Bassano who maintains an extensive documentation.

His complete musical scores and some other writings are available on demand from Frog Peak Music, a Composers Collective in Lebanon, NH. frogpeak.org.

Fox, Hugh : Born in Chicago in 1932. Polio at age 4, cured by a pre-Saulk experimental medicine that worked. Spent his children totally immersed in the arts, was part of the All Childrens' Grand Opera group run by Viennese genius Zerlina Muhlman Metzger, studied violin and composition with P. Marinus Paulson, art and ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, was pushed into Medicine by his M.D. father, finished four years of pre-med and a year of medicine, then got an M.A. at Loyola in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English/American Literature at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It was at Urbana-Champaign that he met and married Lucia Ungaro Zevallos, a Peruvian poet-critic who was getting her Ph.D. in Romance Languages, and after the marriage they moved to Los Angeles where he taught for ten years at Loyola-Marymount University and was immersed in the film-world. At the same time thanks to his wife he began to go to Peru to visit his Peruvian family and slowly visited all the major ruins in the pre-Columbian Americas. He met Harry Smith in Berkeley in 1968 and they became best friends and for some twenty years Fox would visit Smith 2-3 times a year in New York City/Brooklyn and work on Smith's magazines, get to know the poets and writers in the New York scene. He was a Fulbright Professor for a year in Mexico (1961), two years in Caracas (1964-'66), which especially made sense because he married a Peruvian in 1956. In 1968 he moved to Michigan State U. and taught there until he retired 6 years ago. While at Michigan State U. he had a Fulbright professorship in Brazil where he met and married a Brazilian M.D., studied Latin American literature on a grant from the Organization of American States at the U. of Buenos Aires, and after beginning to make archaeological discoveries and have his books on archaeology published, he received another grant from the Organization of American States to spend a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He has some 104 books published.

"For decades I was immersed in the novels of Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and the like, although I even wrote the first critical study of Charles Bukowski and was influenced by his super-realistic style. But mainly I like my style to be somewhat 'classic,' almost Jane Austin-ish, getting into the center of the characters' lives/feelings/aspirations. Since I was a child I have been totally immersed in the arts. Polio and then cured, and then shoved into opera, violin, piano, musical composition, drawing, painting, ceramics, my house practically a library of classics. Then French, Czech, German, Italian, I married a Peruvian, turned into an archaeologist and immersed myself in Pre-History. So there's always the big Overview in my work, man on planet earth, everything that exists the way it is impossible, but still there, so we live in an ambience of total wonder/impossibility."

Johansson, Erik : “I am a 24 years old photographer from Sweden based in Gothenburg. I have specialized in creative retouch and like to change my photos in impossible and strange ways. I get my inspiration from situations in my daily life and I do both personal projects and photos for advertisement agencies in Sweden and overseas.”

Website: alltelleringet.com.

<Click to contact Erik Johansson>

Levinson, Heller : Lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior.

He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Sulfur, Hunger, Talisman, First Intensity, Laurel Review, The Wandering Hermit, Ampersand, etc. His most recent publication, SMELLING MARY, is newly out from Howling Dog Press and has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Prize.

Please visit: hellerlevinson.com for more information.

Perchik, Simon : An attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website simonperchik.com.

Terrill, Mark : Shipped out of San Francisco as a merchant seaman to the Far East and beyond, studied and spent time with Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, and has lived in Germany since 1984, where he’s been scraping by in various incarnations, including shipyard welder, road manager for rock bands, cook, postal worker and poet. Recent books and chapbooks include Superabundance (Longhouse Poetry); Something Red (Plan B Press); Bread & Fish (The Figures); and his selected translations of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Like a Pilot (Sulphur River Literary Review Press). His writings have been translated into German, French and Portuguese, and recently he’s performed his work in various venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Prague. He is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books and was guest-editor for a special German Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review (2009).

van Nouhuys, Dirk : “I write short stories, some experimental forms, and occasionally verse, but I think of myself mostly as a novelist, and have written four novels. Two have been serialized in a small literary magazine and several excerpts from them have appeared separately. 50 items of fiction and a few poems have appeared in literary or general magazines. I occasionally publish photography.

“I have also published technical reports and popular articles about networking and application of computers to text processing. I published a book on Macintosh applications with Wiley in 1985.”

Learn more at: wandd.com.

XeusZenon : A young poet self-named in jest (Andrew Derek Patterson), he walked into the light of, was the “discovery of,” this struggly, miscreant, editor. Nobody else read him (seriously). He hailed from Brooklyn, loved that he’d found a way to live and eat and sleep for nothing—never work again. A drop-out, a freeloader, to some. Went to a “privileged” music school in New York and earned that degree, you know the one: a bachelor’s-that-means-nothing-to-most-employers. Never married. Never bred. Never “made it”. Now I hear he’s dead; months ago already, nearly a year. The juicer. At 31, he O.D.’d on his Drug Of Choice. Quick and painless, right? Leaving his immediate family and a few stray friends in the lurch. The juicer! This all feels very much like a movie on MTV, or somewhere. He’d be so proud, this issue, appearing alongside a biographer of his favorite poet (Hugh Fox wrote beat Bukowski’s first bio, way back when). Proud, appearing beside the famous Simon Perchik! et alii. All of us working, here. All of us writers, struggling. One thing he did before he left my company—this was November 2008, while we were living in my sedan and finding free food and digging music (we both knew all the words and riffs to Primus' " ") and sharing very kind street-drugs and camping in the Santa Fe ski basin and BEING at the library…—he dropped 3 books in my studio. A first edition William S. Burroughs, softcover schoolboy poetry, the one with the red monkey asses in a Warholesque pattern (which I soon sold, for money to eat and drink); an autobiography of a woman who, like Amelia Earhart, vanished while flying (an intellectually-puzzling choice); and… well, perhaps the other book should be listed as his innovative Collected Poems. A gassy god-element, indeed! Before he vacated Earth, he responded this way, to a preview of Flag Football Issue, by email: “It’s simple, and it works.” After that, I never heard from him again (except in dreams). His final poem (“the dirge,” as I call it,) a public suicide note-post, will appear in a later issue. For now I can barely clearly celebrate his efforts. How sad… how desperate. I hope he met Carol B. upon the density of ethers? RiP.

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