Wednesday, January 22 - Russ Kick, Death Poems

Wednesday night on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  RUSS KICK.  It’s perhaps possible to talk with my guest tonight Russ Kick about nearly anything.  Or everything, and to hear him talk about it all well, and authoritatively.  Or anti-authoritatively.  Ha!  He’s the legendary underground publisher and editor of all kinds of books, about government, society and the arts, and most recently the wonderful mad genius behind three volumes of literary fiction and nonfiction organized and imagined and illustrated by graphic artists --- in other words cartoonists --- in the amazing instant classic The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals.  You might know him best through his work as editor of the Everything You Know series, from his own Disinformation Press.  Russ Kick is a kind of Tom Paine pamphleteer meets archivist and political-cultural provocateur, and his latest if unlikely contribution to the literature of what is often not celebrated is an anthology of poetry with a helpfully inviting subtitle.  It’s called Death Poems: Classic, Contemporary, Witty, Serious, Tear-Jerking, Wise, Profound, Angry, Funny, Spiritual, Atheistic, Uncertain, Personal, Political, Mythic, Earthy, and Only Occasionally Morbid. It’s a lovely volume, with all the usual suspects (Dickenson, Yeats, Hughes, Shakespeare and Homer) to our own late Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins and Andrei Codrescu, just to drop a few names.  Kick will talk about his project, and the two of us read some favorite poems, me in Studio C and Russ Kick from the auspices of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, thanks!.  Thanks to you for listening, on the radio or online, or later as a download from the KPFK archives. Please remember Bibliocracy Radio when the next fund drive arrives.