Had come across some poems online on old ex- using a 14 line sonnet format, which inspired me to write this poem now on Eyeshot, part of a collection titled The Mystic Writing Pad, with others in it soon showing up in Hobart, Gargoyle, New Orleans Review, Georgetown Review, etc…dig the pic of William T. Vollmann, for ref. to Fathers and Crows in the text…
Reading from poetry collection…
5 books published and 5 books written. Two screenplays and one TV pilot. Guess it’s not too bad.
My poetry collection can now be ordered on Amazon.
The cover to my full-length collection (84 pages) of poetry, Ourselves or Nothing, out soon from The Olympia Press as The New Traveller’s Companion #157.
Yep, that is indeed Dick Cheney on the cover — strange, but for a reason (the opening poem is about 9/11).
2010 has turned out to be my year of collections in book form:
The Other Eden (Dybbuk Press): Novellas.
Ourselves or Nothing (Traveller’s Companion): Poetry.
Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (Black Lawrence): short stories.
Auto-ethnographies: Toward a Systematic Sociological Introspection of Emotions (Cambridge Scholars): Socio-anthropological essays.
First Person Sociology (McFarland): Anthology of essays I have edited.
The Olympia Press has agreed to take on my poetry collection, Ourselves or Nothing, as a New Traveller’s Companion, Vol. #149. See how it goes. The collection collects poetry from 20 years ago to 2 days ago, literally. It is 84 pages. Should be out in May/June.
I seldom write poetry, maybe one or two pieces a year. I started off in the small press with poetry, publishing my first poem when I was fifteen, and even got pai for it. By the time I was 17, I had published 300 poems (and a dozen stories) in the little mags, and had my own small press. By 18, I had three or four chapbooks of poems out.
Here is the back cover copy for the poetry book:
OURSELVES OR NOTHING
In keeping with Maurice Girodas’ tradition that the Olympia Press also published works of fine literary value, the New Traveller’s Companion Series presents the infamously iconoclastic Michael Hemmingson’s first full-length collection of poetry, bringing together twenty years of previously published and new works that span time and consciousness, moving across Europe, America, and the fifth dimension, dealing with sex, death, hope, despair, love, hate, imagination, reality, jumping from the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01, the 2010 quake in Haiti, to a racial lynching in the 1950s. The dead speak through the living and the living remember long drives into remote areas like Jacumba and Borrego Springs in California in this fascinating assembly of poems long and short.
Michael Hemmingson has carved a name for himself in contemporary literature with his novels, short stories, and essays, and now proves he can tackle the poetic from with significance and ardent necessity. To say these poems could save your life is not hyperbole.
