Substrate: Poems

Another greatly admired poet and Deadhead is Jim Powell. His long awaited new collection of poems Substrate: Poems is now offered from Pantheon Books. Powell is the author of many books on lyric poetry and translation from Classical Greek and Latin, and he was a MacArthur Fellow in 1993 for poetry.

True Legacy

One other note about Peter Conners. In response to Ben Ratcliff's article on the Dead in the April 12th issue of the NY Times, Conners has written a reply that made the Times Letter section on 4/26. He notes "The article should also be a reminder to Deadheads that fetishizing artifact over experience threatens the values of spontaneity and creative possibility that super charged every Dead show. Let's use the live recordings as a way to perpetuate the celebratory rituals of music, dance and unity that are the Dead's (and Deadheads') true legacy."

Growing Up Dead

Poet Peter Conners who claims he was born in a small town called America, has just published his memoir with Da Capo Press: Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, which chronicles ten years of his life from a suburban Rochester teenager through 1995 as a serious Deadhead. Conners is known for his prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pines Press, 2007), his well regarded novella Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008), and as being founding co-editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction. His new book is being touted as part memoir, part social history, and for (as noted in Publishers Weekly) "offering a perspective often missing from other Dead chronicles."

Conners is currently on tour himself giving readings from the book and doing interviews. In June he is scheduled for several events: on the 3rd David Gans will interview him for "The Grateful Dead Hour" (www.gdhour.com), and this conversation will be continued from the 10th to the 24th on "The Well" (www.well.com); Conners will also be at Books Inc. on June 4th (601 Van Ness in San Francisco.)