Poet, editor, mIEKAL aND blew into town from Wisconsin last week, accompanied by boxes of enticing Xexoxial publications and a companion with an enviable hat and a serious camera. He took the poetry scene by storm. Between gigs, he declared himself pleased to spend some time in sunny Buffalo after suffering record-breaking day-after-day snow in Wisconsin and the physical miseries that go along with it.

"A man and a woman
Are one.
A man a woman and a blackbird
Are one."

From a work in progress: three more short animations, based on sections of Wallace Stevens' famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", are now online. The first three were completed in February, the second batch in April, and there should be more to come a bit later in the year.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/blackbird/

Also available, if you visit my home page, is a one-off song/video entitled "Train Coming".

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

I recently attended several readings (one by a Famous Poet, and one firmly lodged in the amateur realm) of a very painful nature. At the most recent one, the audience seemed divided between people who seemed about to experience myocardial infarctions and people who had just woken from tonic-clonic seizures (to use polite terms). Unfortunately, the General Non-Poetic Public believes that poetry is painful by its very nature, and I don't like to agree with the GNPP in matters of poetry.

Here is a poem I wrote during the Famous Poet's reading:

The About Poet's Poems Are About What They Are About

the about poet’s poems are about what they are about
they roll off the podium line by line and each end-stop
emits a hissy clink distorted by the mike
but the poet does not hear the clamor of his silences
he is busy stretching every vowel
into a midwesternized parody of Olivier’s less
successful Shakespeare adaptations
the ones no one has bothered to colorize

http://edwardpicot.com/blackbirdicon.jpg

"I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds."

From a work in progress: three more short animations, based on sections of Wallace Stevens' famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", are now online. The first three were completed in February, and there should be more to come a bit later in the year.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/blackbird/

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

PoetrySz: demystifying mental illness is an e-zine featuring outstanding poetry by people living with mental illness. It is updated three times a year in March, July and November. New and established poets from countries like UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many others have been featured. Since its inception in 2000, more than 80 poets have been published in PoetrySz.

The e-zine started as an experimental project for its editor, Jill Chan, who at that time was just recovering from mental illness:

“It gave me the opportunity to visualize and actualize a goal at a time when I needed to. Because while recovering, I was at a stage of feeling around and needed some grounding.”

The e-zine has served as a venue for poets who are just starting out and who went on to be featured in various literary journals and publications. In addition, among the established poets featured in PoetrySz are kari edwards who is in the Best American Poetry anthology; Christopher Barnes who has a web page in the BBC; and Coral Hull, a well-known artist / poet / activist from Australia.

We welcome all styles of poetry. You can read the submission guidelines at http://www.poetrysz.net

My views on the Confessionals are controversial and I do not expect people necessarily to agree with me. I know many women and feminists admire Plath and Sexton and blame the men in their lives for their suicides and unhappiness (including possibly Lowell, who was their poetry teacher at Boston University).

My view is informed by the fact that Lowell, Plath, and Sexton all had bipolar disorder according to most biographers. As a role model for mentally ill people who want to become writers, I prefer Lowell to Sexton or Plath because I do not feel that his poetry was adversely affected by his illness, at least until he got Lithium for it in the last two years of his life. (After that, he wrote only flat, cryptic, boring sonnets. It does not speak well for Lithium as a drug for creative individuals. But he did stop having manic episodes in which he took up a new woman and then landed in the hospital, leaving both old and new women puzzled, angry, and confused.)