Search results for ""Author Peter Conners""

"Conners' prose poem is not just a beautiful quirky moment that gives us a glimpse of the miraculous, but also an attempt to become a myth in itself. That Conners seems to get it all into one book is simply amazing. What can I say? A literary master."--Ilya Kaminsky "Conners writes with the playfulness and kinetic energy of an action painter. His spatters of images and fragmented narratives assume the condition of an exuberant non-sense that, in changing perspective, asserts a logic of its own."--Stuart Dybek Peter Conners is the author of Whiskey and Winter.

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Prose poems and flash fictions revealing the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of living through Covid, political chaos, and personal upheaval. Peter Conners’ unique blend of prose poetry, flash fiction, and other spare poetic forms pays witness to the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of surviving a global pandemic during one of the most politically and culturally divisive times in American history. As a divorced father living in a blended family with 4 children, navigating a new marriage, and also caring for elderly parents, pandemic restrictions and their attendant scary weirdness hit hard. After a decade of publishing highly regarded nonfiction books about music and counterculture, Conners knew that only poetry could do these strange days justice. The result is Conners’ first prose poetry collection in a dozen years. Moving from raw personal poems like “One of you went” and “My father wanders” to overt political rants “The beaches are filled” and “Welcome to the last” to comically absurd flash fictions like “Superhero” and “Hello, my name is Larry” to meditations on relationships (“A small house;” “The old husband”) and spirituality (“If each martyr;” “Love everyone”), Conners strikes all the rich notes that illustrate our humanity, desire for love and connection, and striving for a rebirth that awaits just beyond the edge suffering.“Part Tao, part surrealist dialogue, Peter Conners has penned a book of precise yet effusive runes from the well-gnawed bones of a man reflecting upon his family and nation at midlife. Here we have poet as citizen, philosopher, father, humorist, husband, we have the pandemic (in actuality and as metaphor), we have passing time, memory, ‘our whole dumb history,’ the theater of self with its ‘copious technical difficulties.’ These are minimalist and thin-trimmed parable-like stories, dialogues, and beautiful confessions that in the end haggle down the price we’ve paid through the last brutal years, encouraging the reader to take our problems and ‘Feed them to the squirrels. Those little fuckers will eat anything.’”—Sean Thomas Dougherty“What you know after reading only a handful of these poems is that they have the ease, and share the privileges, of being loved and cared for by a master — not as common a thing in American poetry as you might think. This is an end-of-days story for precisely our times, presented formally in a fluid blending of at least three distinct genres, managing to celebrate them all to rich effects. These poems capture a litany of almost microscopic moments, resolute in how they are illustrative of our stunningly particular days. I love this book and I want you to read it if you care about looking closely at who we are by looking at who we have been.” —Bruce Weigl “Beyond the Edge of Suffering goes beyond life's edges, and not only in suffering. This brilliant collection by Peter Conners is a genius book of our times, with masks and viruses, nasal sprays, elixirs, diseases, and exams. It is deep and poignant, with lovely and surprising sparks of humor: a tiny porcelain woman, plays in language: bodies, memories, dreams. Diamonds. Martyrs. Prayers and non-prayers. Genesis and ribs. Fathers and mothers and a son and daughter. Crying Superheroes. Weeping willows. Mosquitos and monkeys and the highest house number in America. This collection is so holy-ghostingly good, it will continue to stay with you.”—Kim ChinqueePeter Conners is the author of ten books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including the prose poetry collections, Of Whiskey and Winter, and The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees. He also edited the ground-breaking prose poetry/flash fiction anthology PP/FF: An Anthology, as well as an issue of American Book Review dedicated to prose poetry/flash fiction, and was founding editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction. In his nonfiction books, he has documented music and countercultural communities in such books as Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead; JAMerica: The History of the Jam Band and Festival Scene; Cornell ‘77: The Music, The Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead’s Concert at Barton Hall; and White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. His books have been published by White Pine Press, Da Capo Press, City Lights, Cornell University Press, Starcherone Books, and Marick Press. He lives with his family in Rochester, NY where he works as Publisher and Executive Director of the award-winning independent publishing house BOA Editions. His website is: www.peterconners.com

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In 1960 Timothy Leary was not yet famous -- or infamous -- and Allen Ginsberg was both. Leary, eager to expand his experiments at the Harvard Psilocybin Project to include accomplished artists and writers, knew that Ginsberg held the key to bohemia's elite. Ginsberg, fresh from his first experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico, was eager to promote the spiritual possibilities of psychedelic use. Thus, "America's most conspicuous beatnik" was recruited as Ambassador of Psilocybin under the auspices of an Ivy League professor, and together they launched the psychedelic revolution and turned on the hippie generation. White Hand Society weaves a fascinating and entertaining tale of the life, times and friendship of these two larger-than-life figures and the incredible impact their relationship had on America. Peter Conners has gathered hundreds of pages of letters, documents, studies, FBI files, and other primary resources that shed new light on their relationship, and a veritable who's who of artists and cultural figures appear along the way, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, Willem de Kooning, and Barney Rosset. The story of the "psychedelic partnership" of two of the most famous, charismatic and controversial members of America's counterculture brings together a multitude of major figures from politics, the arts, and the intersection of intellectual life and outlaw culture in a way that sheds new light on the dawn of the 1960s. "Through the years City Lights has brought us seminal work by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and now, this detail-rich double bio of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. I knew both these men pretty well, and the times intimately, and Peter Conners has been true to it all. I don't know how he amassed the trunks of data he must have used to find the jillions of details which were new to me, but I'm certainly glad that he did. This book wins a well deserved spot on my shelf, and belongs with anyone who wants an intimate view of the Sixties-Seventies spinning of the Great Wheel of the Dharma." --Peter Coyote, actor/author, Sleeping Where I Fall "Peter Conners has given us a wondrous tale of picaresque adventure and authentic friendship -- between Leary the trickster-explorer-scientist and Ginsberg the activist-bard-philosopher, two seminal figures who pioneered new pathways through the cultural maelstrom of the sixties."--Ralph Metzner, co-author, with Ram Dass & Gary Bravo, of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture "The Psychedelic Revolution of the Sixties began with the meeting of two visionary explorers into the unmapped regions of inner consciousness -- Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. In the White Hand Society Peter Conners charts the course from the earliest dirt roads of laughing gas to the superhighways of LSD in one compelling story. It is a thrilling ride on what Ginsberg called the Trackless Transit System, going where no one else had dared venture. Take this as a new kind of guidebook into the mystery of the mind." --Bill Morgan, author of Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide to the Beat Generation in America and The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation "Peter Conners' White Hand Society is a gripping account of a key event in 20th Century history, the decision to actively promote strong psychedelics to the population at large. Conners tells the Timothy Leary story from the traditional perspective of the West Coast counterculture, but he emphasizes the egalitarian influence that the Beat movement had on him and, in particular, the huge Blakean personality of Allen Ginsberg. The result is a portrait of two remarkable figures who came together and changed our culture forever." --John Higgs

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On May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, on the Cornell University campus, in front of 8,500 eager fans, the Grateful Dead played a show so significant that the Library of Congress inducted it into the National Recording Registry. The band had just released Terrapin Station and was still finding its feet after an extended hiatus. In 1977, the Grateful Dead reached a musical peak, and their East Coast spring tour featured an exceptional string of performances, including the one at Cornell.Many Deadheads claim that the quality of the live recording of the show made by Betty Cantor-Jackson (a member of the crew) elevated its importance. Once those recordings—referred to as "Betty Boards"—began to circulate among Deadheads, the reputation of the Cornell '77 show grew exponentially.With time the show at Barton Hall acquired legendary status in the community of Deadheads and audiophiles.Rooted in dozens of interviews—including a conversation with Betty Cantor-Jackson about her recording—and accompanied by a dazzling selection of never-before-seen concert photographs, Cornell '77 is about far more than just a single Grateful Dead concert. It is a social and cultural history of one of America's most enduring and iconic musical acts, their devoted fans, and a group of Cornell students whose passion for music drove them to bring the Dead to Barton Hall. Peter Conners has intimate knowledge of the fan culture surrounding the Dead, and his expertise brings the show to life. He leads readers through a song-by-song analysis of the performance, from "New Minglewood Blues" to "One More Saturday Night," and conveys why, forty years later, Cornell '77 is still considered a touchstone in the history of the band.As Conners notes in his Prologue: "You will hear from Deadheads who went to the show. You will hear from non-Deadhead Cornell graduates who were responsible for putting on the show in the first place. You will hear from record executives, academics, scholars, Dead family members, tapers, traders, and trolls. You will hear from those who still live the Grateful Dead every day. You will hear from those who would rather keep their Grateful Dead passions private for reasons both personal and professional. You will hear stories about the early days of being a Deadhead and what it was like to attend, and perhaps record, those early shows, including Cornell '77."

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