—Notice To The Membership & Interested Parties— The Society would direct your attention to the menu bar above. Conditions of Parole have been revised to reflect new guidelines for submissions to Parole. Note as well new menu categories have been added to facilitate a more direct access to posts by specific as well as general subject matter. Number 1 —FEATURE— “Poesy’s ravening violet flames”:  Whalen in Ekstasis Part TwoBruce Holsapple Read More —SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS— Philip Whalen’s KYOTO Notebooks + (pdf) Keith Kumasen Abbott Read More All Best Phil, Annotated Letters from Philip ..read more

Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press Poet Ken Mikolowski and his wife, painter Ann Mikolowski, started The Alternative Press in Detroit in 1969. They were part of The Artists Workshop co-founded by John Sinclair and George Tysh. For a fascinating history of the press click on Emily Warn’s article D.I.Y Detroit. As well, Rebecca Kosick’s Detroit’s Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage is scheduled for a 2025 pub date from Wayne State University. Dr. Kosick is the co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute—her interview with Ken Mikolowski can be viewed here: Ken Mikolowski’s Th ..read more

Mark Young, Ley Lines II, Sandy Press, 2023 Ley Lines II, Mark Young’s latest poetry selection, offers a who’s who of celebrity names as titles. For those unfamiliar with the term, ley lines are straight alignments drawn between various historic structures, prehistoric sites and prominent landmarks. In Young’s case, the alignments are drawn between celebrated names on the map of history and pop culture. For the 93 poems in this selection, the titular designations are essentially non sequiturs. However it is the novelty of the titles that provide the hooks to Mark’s meaty quatrains ..read more

Charles Bernstein’s GPS Recalculating by Charles Bernstein (The University of Chicago Press, 2013) When they are not being performed, Charles Bernstein’s poems are on the edge of performance. But they don’t start that way. They start as notes from a mind that is never still, fueled by extensive reading, a constant regimen like a diet or a job. He reads the newspapers, the mail, and the philosophers. He talks on the telephone. This activity is divided between the pleasure of finding something new, the recasting of a text in a grotesque or alien context, stripping it for a good idea, and talkin ..read more

Tom Raworth and the Tale of No Ordinary O Alastair Johnston Tom Raworth (1938–2017) was a major figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s. Charles Olson praised his first book The Relation Ship as “preternaturally wise.” Ted Berrigan wrote: “His poems are not afraid to be beautiful, & they are not afraid to seem clever … He’s as good as we are, & rude a thing as it is to say, we don’t expect that, from English poets today. (I wonder is he better?)” Raworth said: “I was a Teddy Boy in the days of bicycle chains and razors. A police record for stealing a lorry. Didn’t like the id ..read more

Alastair Johnston’s long association with Philip Whalen has resulted in numerous collaborations between the poet and the printer/publisher including Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe & Other Prose Takes (Poltroon Press, 2014)and The Diamond Noodle (1980). He has put together a wonderful display of Whalen’s orthography along with annotations that illustrates what one would encounter in such a correspondence. It is best viewed in its original conception as a pdf file mainly because of the limitations of this platform. Below is the attempted replication of the first page. Click on the ti ..read more

Philip Whalen’s KYOTO NOTEBOOKS Transcriptions & Notations by Keith Kumasen Abbott As a professor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder Colorado, Keith Kumasen Abbott (1944-2019) spent his summer breaks over the course of four years, beginning in 2005, going through the Philip Whalen archives at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library as well as the UC Davis Library where Gary Snyder’s papers are stored, gathering material for his lectures and essays on Northwest writers (including Kesey and Brautigan), many of which were transcribed and published in Parole. One of the res ..read more

—Notice To The Membership & Interested Parties— The Society would direct your attention to the menu bar above. Conditions of Parole have been revised to reflect new guidelines for submissions to Parole. Note as well new menu categories have been added to facilitate a more direct access to posts by specific as well as general subject types. Volume I, Number 4 —FEATURE— “Poesy’s ravening violet flames”:  Whalen in Ekstasis Part Oneby Bruce Holsapple read more —FEATURED— Bowed A Little Philip Whalen’s Zen Journals & The San Francisco Renaissance read more Alice Notley Telling Like ..read more

by Bruce Holsapple  1. Elevated States Just beyond two minutes into his NET interview for the film series USA: Poetry, a relatively trim, focused Phil Whalen responds to an off-camera question, likely about how he began writing poetry. Whalen was in his early forties: I suppose that one of my first poetical experiences was that of having my appendix burst and having an emergency operation and being in the hospital the first time and having an ether vision of great enlightenment and also a physical experience of light as itself and an odd feeling of the total meaningfulness and rightness ..read more

—Notice To The Membership & Interested Parties— The Society would direct your attention to the menu bar above. Conditions of Parole have been revised to reflect new guidelines for submissions to Parole. Note as well new menu categories have been added to facilitate a more direct access to posts by specific as well as general subject types. Volume I, Number 3 —FEATURE— Milan Kundera: The Grace Of Dying On Time by Andrei Codrescu read more —FEATURED— The Fourth Dimension Spring And All at 100 read more After Malibu Remembering Tom Clark by Pat Nolan read more The Last Laugh GP Skratz and ..read more