Other Stuff

But what's important to you?

Sometimes quite lonely, probably just like you, I have been a voracious reader since my early school years.

Good parents, George and Rose, Very, very good parents, in fact. And good siblings. All alive, healthy, responsible, loving, compassionate, and much loved. Perhaps that is important. Or that I dearly love them in return. I have rebelled, like "crazy," too. Just like you, too? I don't know if "rebellion" ever stops. Even when we get more mature and add a lifetime of wisdom and uncommonly good sense, we rebel, don't we, sometimes against the indiscretions of generations that follow us, even.

Found some good refuge from the sometimes miserable parochialism of small town life at local golf course owned by Rocco Furfare, an English teacher who had served during WWII in Italy, where his plane was shot down but he survived, returned home and went to Cornell (where he graduated with honors), then became an English teacher, then bought land and built a golf course, and years later, when I started hanging out there, he took me in as his "protege." He turned me on to even better reading, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner and Joyce. T.S. Eliot, his favorite among poets. He and his Dostoevsky worshipping drinking pal Jack Ankowski did mention Gertrude Stein, but neither introduced me to women writers. Ironically, Henry Miller did, namely Anais Nin.

Read "avant gardist" Henry Miller from mid-teens (15-16) and began developing some small, later large, and some seasons inflated but today a bit wiser skepticism of "America," any and all nationalism, most all patriotism, a lot of Capitalism, and of course the isms Reading isn't required for -- sexism, racism, homophobia, classism.

Studied Psychology, English, Philosophy, and Sociology in undergraduate school, especially humanistic-existential psychology Gestalt Therapist and broadly cultural James November introduced me to at Jacksonville University.. Graduated with B.S. in Psychology. Went to California, to become a psychotherapist. Studied English instead, at Sonoma State University, under incomparable guidance provided by Poet David Bromige, who introduced me to New American poetry, its "tradition" extending back to the Modernists, and its later developments, particularly Language Poetry, which I still like and deeply respect, still have considerable allegiance to, still resent considerably also, still wish to both understand more deeply and divorce myself from as well. I completed my M.A.thesis "A Primer to Language Poetry," in 1988. I taught English at Santa Rosa Junior College from 1988-1998. I returned to western New York in 1999 after 17 years in California.

Co-Director (with David Bromige and Maureen Hurley) of the Russian River Writers' Guild in the early and middle 1990's and curator of the Cinnabar Theater Reading Series, I hosted dozens of notable poets, including these: Dodie Bellamy, Cydney Chadwick, Norma Cole, Catherine Bowers, David Bromige, Avery Burns, Ken Edwards, Steve Farmer, Kathleen Fraser, Peter Ganick, Susan Gevirtz, Peter Gizzi, Robert Grenier, Crag Hill, Andrew Joron, Christopher Reiner, Myung Mi Kim, Joanne Kyger, Michael Magee, Susan Smith Nash, Aldon Nielsen, Stephen Ratcliffe, Kit Robinson, Layne Russell, Spencer Selby, Cole Swensen, Susan Thackrey, Rodrigo Toscano, Hung Q. Tu, and John Yau. This probably says something about my editorial persuasions, as does the fact that several of the poets listed here I count as lifelong friends and still correspond with regularly.

Therapied, thoroughly, which I consider among my most serious achievements, not simply because I paid every dollar of it out of my own pocket on an "Adjunct" instructor's modest salary but because I believe that it's one of the coolest commitments folks can make to themselves if they are able... Eternally grateful to "Dear Abby," you know who you are, and of course you "know" the real Steve Tills, as much or more than anyone ever will.

Politically "progressive" and active all of my adult life, from "anti-nuclear movement" activism, including civil disobedience in early 1980's and Campaigning in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Kerry in 2004 and Obama in 2008, to much quite frenzied political blogging and letter writing and such on Internet throughout pathetic, tragic, horrible Bush years 2000-2009.

Irregularly active blogger at my "mostly Literary" blog (also called Black Spring) from 2003 until the present.

Have published a few books, Invisible Diction (Loose Gravel, 1996); Mr. Magoo (Loose Gravel, 1997ish); Behave (dPress, 2004); Rugh Stuff (theenk Books, 2009); essays/reviews in some good journals, poetry in some good magazines, too.

Serious appetite for wide and deep range of poetries, particularly, as you may have already gathered, from the more "experimental," "innovative," "exploratory," "avant garde" traditions. What's "cool" now, the so-called "Abstract Pastoral," "Conceptualism," "Flarf," "Kind," "Slow," "Hybrids," "Hay(na)ku," "Mixed Visual and Textural," or something that you, yourself, have begun making, developing, riffing off of, seriously enjoying writing? I'm interested, in any case, in all of these developments, as well as all the meaningful and unique writing still being produced by practitioners working out of established formal and material orientations.