Quintet for the Apocalypse by Michael D. Main by Howling Dog Press

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TO PURCHASE QUINTET FOR THE APOCALYPSE, click on the links below. The links are for two distinct hardbound editions of the book, with shipping options, whether to a U.S. address or out of the country—for example, Canada. Buyers can purchase through either PayPal or their own credit card. Although this online sample is only 20+ pages in length, the in-print, hardbound book you are ordering runs 102 pages, measuring 8½” x 11”. As an additional bonus, each book includes a music CD of Michael Main performing [with orchestration] his poetic works found in Quintet for the Apocalypse. The numbered Ltd. Collectors Edition Hardbound is signed by the author, Michael D. Main, and sells for $40 per copy, plus shipping. The Unsigned Edition Hardbound sells for $25 per copy, plus shipping, [USA ADDRESSES, TWO WEEKS FOR DELIVERY] Click here to buy the SIGNED Ltd. Edition Hardbound @$40 ea, plus shipping. > or Click here to buy the Unsigned Edition Hardbound @$25 ea., plus shipping.

QUINTET FOR THE APOCALYPSE: INTRODUCTION

> i. s p a r k s f r o m t h e h i n g e . . .

“Clearly, we are at a critical point in human history where the current Wiring has proven itself limited to the point of being defunct, as the same habitual patterns of human exploitation of other humans and the biosphere continue to plague us as they have done throughout the ages,” writes Michael Annis in his The Hinge Manual: Linguistic Metamorphosis through Hinge Theory Dynamics in the Language Structures of Heller Levinson (Howling Dog Press, 2009). “A higher level of perceiving, understanding, and communicating through evolved mental capacity, producing new responses of interaction, is absolutely essential,” Annis portends.

o f p i v o t s, l i n g u i s t i c s . . . ...and tripwires

"Through imminent, Hinge generated paradigms, the practitioner can be confident that a human race receptive to this dynamic form will be able to accomplish a thorough and ongoing re-Wiring of the human intellect and corpus, helping to facilitate our ability to survive on this planet through productive, creative, harmonious, and sanguine interaction." It is with aims in accordance with such views that I conceived of an Apocalypse in and of poetics for the 21st Century. My intent was not simply to start anew where the daring and essential language experiments of the Surrealists, Dadaists, and Futurists of eighty years ago in Europe left off, but to make newly manifest the potential works of Language over and above the works of Man. The stakes are high. This experiment is neither board game nor solipsistic exercise toward a 'new Concrete Poetry'. There are good reasons, after all, why literary movements such as Concrete Poetry (at least in the English language) did not survive beyond one or two long out-of-print and now disregarded anthologies. Rather, I wanted to see if Language itself can show us enlivened routes to follow in the midst of the apocalyptic demise of its own debased role as slavish "utility" of "civilization" – and this, moreover, amidst what many informed individuals are coming to regard as the imminent collapse of civilization itself as we know it. A critical turn of consciousness being the phrase, "as we know it." For what have we come “to know,” following the word out from its imprisoned inclusion in the medieval monastery, about where written language might really long, after all, to lead us? Are we to be left, at long last and in the final hours, with the mere fits and starts of text messaging? And then ‘off with the serifs!’ to the dung heap of unlettered zombies? The final dead letter exchange of both man and mind? But is what we know –“as we know it”– really much, if anything at all, about the true reality and effects of our language? We have witnessed intriguing speculation and research in recent decades in the disciplines of Phonemics, Morphophonemics, Theoretical Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognition, and Psychology. Michael Annis writes, “A Hinge construction, an evolutionary leap in the idea of “poem”—indeed, in the sum total of lingual communication—is like an egg that continues to multiply its components to produce a living zygote—that zygote growing and reforming until life breathes into it. Hinge is, by its intrinsic vita, a form of language architecture exploding with immense poetic power and subtlety in revealing the interconnectedness of ideas, realizations, and creative unfoldings. It is a dawn breaking forth with an uncountable multiplicity of rays, combustible, energizing, precipitous, and fertile. Persons, minds, bodies, spirits, and souls inhabit language, and are cohabited by language. Hinge describes a ...

Of course I had my own work to do. The conceptions and plans for technical presentation hardly forming the least of it, I could not hope to speak to peoples of the 21st Century, an epoch that was portending to be the actual end of time "as we know it" (no mere illustrative, or Blakean imaginative journey this), unless and until I spent a year studying what the poets of the war-ravaged century just passed had discovered in their own necessary turn to apocalyptic experience ... and the accompanying mass manifestations of social collapse, physical and intellectual hunger, and spiritual despair.

o c e a n s (n) o w s a l t l o c k e r . . . . . . e r o s i c (e) f a c i n g

c o r a l g r (a) f t t e n d r i l s . . . . . . b e a r i n g f i e (r) y a r c h o n

II.

TRACINGS

e a r t h (t) r a c i n g h y m n a l . . . . . . s t r e a m r (o) c k s c o r e

b a t w i n g c i (e) r r v o l i t i o n . . . . . . e d e n ' s p r e (s) e r v e c l a w

III.

AVES

w a r n g o s (l) i n g n a t i v i t y . . . . . . w i n g b (a) n d i n g a v e s

e x i t b (i) r d d e v o l u t i o n . . . . . . f l y w a y w i (r) e e n t r a p

IV. (

W)HO(MAN)IDS

u n b i n d c l (e) a t s p a r k . . . . . . l e a f n o (m) e n r o s e

MICHAEL D. MAIN

> acknowledgements Quintet For The Apocalypse, my contribution to 21st Century Language Poetics, exists due to the inspiration afforded by the visionary, political, and heart pulse of three individuals: poet Heller Levinson, poet and publisher Michael Annis, and visual artist and poet Henry Avignon. With sincere gratitude, I thank them for a most urgent push, so richly exhibited in the body of their respective works, that propelled me toward rewarding new territories of language and poetics. I thank the following visionary scholars and literary editors for supporting and publishing my work this past two years: Michael Annis (Omega7:fromhivethismind : November 2009; Howling Dog Press); Jared Demick (Jivin' Ladybug : October 2009 / February 2011); Mary Ann Sullivan (The Tower Journal : April 2010); and Carol Novack (Mad Hatter's Review : 1Q 2012). In particular, I wish to acknowledge editor and publisher Klaus Gerken, who published an entire module from Quintet For The Apocalypse, thus affording me a valued “Featured Poet” opportunity in the April 2011 issue of Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts; moreover, for his encouragement and support of my work. I would also like to thank Steven Gurton, John Guzlowski, Freke Räihä, Regina Walker, Paulette Turcotte, Leigh Herrick, Heather Gunn, Maria Fatima Gomes, Jill Trear, Carol Novak, Maria Grazia Galatà, Julia Dadds, Julie Spodek, Sitara Monica Perez, Dascha Friedlova, Tash Wesp, Carol Boa, Antonia Lindsey, Zot Lynn Szurgot, Jackie Witmer-Mouton, Willow Gray, and Alison Lola Linnitt for their ongoing encouragement and support of my work. I am most of all in debt to Janet Summers who, in January 2009, quietly and from a distance motivated me to begin writing afresh after a prolonged lapse into creative silence. Her unique and visual ‘path of presence' in both inner and outward realms has inspired me on my own journey of ‘emotive staging' toward outcomes in which dynamic language play imparts the force of vital, lived 'extracts' of authentic being. In this manner she has come to represent for me the affirming, yet sensually personal 'face' of logos. The mind, this book you hold in your hands, ever attempts to lurch forward. But the heart, at maturity, in stripping itself of superficial excitements, looks back to a deeper river, to its most human 'course' of personal history, to witnessed and intimately known embodiments. It is on such a path that all effort of worth is actualized thanks to the nature and nurture of muse. ~ Michael D.. Main

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