Thomas J. Pickard
Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
In office June 25, 2001 – September 4, 2001
President	George W. Bush
Preceded by	Louis Freeh
Succeeded by	Robert Mueller
Personal details
Born	(1950-01-06) January 6, 1950 (age 62) Woodside, New York, U.S.

Thomas J. Pickard (born January 6, 1950) was an acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 71 days in the summer of 2001 following the tenure of Director Louis Freeh. He was replaced just one week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and The Pentagon. Born in Woodside, Queens, New York. He graduated from Saint Francis College in Brooklyn with a BBA in accounting, and subsequently received his MBA in taxation from St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens. He is a Certified Public Accountant, licensed by the state of New York.

Pickard began his career as a Special Agent of the FBI on January 13, 1975, and after a period of training, he was initially assigned to the New York City field office. In April 1979, Pickard was transferred to the Washington, D.C., field office, where he worked in an undercover capacity on the case code-named "ABSCAM." In July 1980, Pickard was promoted to FBI Headquarters, serving in the Inspection and Criminal Investigative Divisions. In October 1984, Pickard reported to the New York City field office as a supervisor in the White-Collar Crime Section and later was appointed to be the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for all White-Collar Crime investigations and violent crime matters in New York.

In 1989, Pickard was selected for the FBI's Senior Executive Service and was transferred to FBI Headquarters, where he oversaw the FBI's finance operations and subsequently its personnel operations. In 1993, Pickard was transferred to the New York City Office once again, to serve as the Special Agent in Charge of the National Security Division, supervising such matters as the trials of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing defendants, the trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman and his co-conspirators, the Manila Air conviction of Ramzi Yousef and his associates, and the July 1996, TWA Flight 800 explosion.

On September 10, 1996, FBI Director Louis Freeh named Pickard to the position of Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington field office. During his tenure there, Pickard supervised such matters as the investigation and arrest of FBI Special Agent Earl Pitts for espionage and the capture of convicted CIA killer Mir Amir Kansi.

On February 2, 1998, Pickard assumed the position of Assistant Director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division at FBI Headquarters. On November 1, 1999, Pickard was appointed Deputy Director, the number two position at the FBI. On June 25, 2001, Pickard was appointed Acting Director of the FBI by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Pickard is implicated in the career challenges FBI agent John P. O'Neill faced with the FBI bureaucracy (along with O'Neill's personality) during the late 1990s and pre-9/11 2000s. In the PBS Frontline documentary “The Man Who Knew.” O'Neill's significant other said O'Neill thought Pickard may have leaked information to the New York Times, but Pickard assured O'Neill he did not. The Times story was seen as a signal by O'Neill that he should leave the FBI; O'Neill died months later in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

External links[link]

• Frontline: The Man Who Knew transcript | PBS Frontline (U.S. TV series) (c) 2002
• "Federal Bureau of Investigation: Directors, Then and Now". http://www.fbi.gov/libref/directors/pickard.htm. Retrieved 2010-04-26. 

v t e Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Hoover • Gray* • Ruckelshaus* • Kelley • Adams* • Webster • Otto* • Sessions • Clarke* • Freeh • Pickard* • Mueller denotes acting

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2007)

Tom Pickard (born 1946, Newcastle upon Tyne, England) is a poet, radio and film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival.

Pickard grew up in the workingclass suburbs of Cowgate and Blakelaw and left school at the age of fourteen. Three years later he met Basil Bunting and was instrumental in the older poet's return to writing in the early 1960s,^[1] leading to the latter's most acclaimed poem, the long, autobiographical "Brigflatts", published in 1965. The association also produced Bunting's scathing "What the Chairman told Tom" ("I want to wash when I meet a poet.... my twelve-year-old can do it - AND rhyme!")

In 1963, with is first wife Connie, Pickard founded and ran the Morden Tower Book Room,^[2] where he organised a series of readings by British and American modernist tradition poets, including Bunting. He was also involved with the Ultima Thule Bookshop - specialising in poetry, music and alternative titles - between 1969 and 1973. During this period he also travelled in the United States to renew friendships with some of the American Morden Tower readers, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn.

In 1973, Pickard moved to London and started writing radio and documentary film scripts. His film credits include We Make Ships (1988), Birmingham is What I Think With--about the poet Roy Fisher(1991) and The Shadow and the Substance (1994). He directed the last three of these films. In 1974, his television play Squire was broadcast by the BBC and starred his friend, the singer songwriter Alan Hull—who wrote music for the play. The two friends also worked together on Pickard's BBC radio documentary, The Jarrow March (1976). He was series editor and director of film inserts on Word Of Mouth, a series of ten 30 minute TV programs for Border TV/ACGB. It won a gold medal in 1990, at the New York International Film And TV Festival, for the best performing arts series, and was a runner-up in the Royal Television Awards.

In London he collaborated with Moira Kelly of Air Gallery to run an international poetry series (which later transferred to The Riverside Studio under David Gotthard) as well as running a book-stall in Camden Lock market.

Pickard's poetry owes much to his reading of Bunting and of the Black Mountain poets, but is also rooted in his own urban working class Northumbrian background. His publications include High on the Walls (1968), The Order of Chance (1971), Hero Dust: New and Selected Poems (1979), Tiepin Eros: New and Selected Poems (1994), fuckwind (1999) Hole in the Wall: New and Selected Poems (2002), The Dark Months of May (2004) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007); the last three published by Flood Editions. Ballad of Jamie Allan was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.^[3] His part autobiographical More Pricks Than Prizes was published in Boston by Pressed Wafer in 2010.

In 2004 he was commissioned by Sage Gateshead and Folkworks to write a libretto, Ballad of Jamie Allan, for the composer John Harle. The opera was premiered in 2005. A CD of Ballad of Jamie Allan (with Omar Ebrahim, Sarah Jane Morris, Kathryn Tickell, Bill Paterson, the Northern Sinfonia with Steve Lodder and Neil MacColl).

He collaborated with John Harle again in 2009 writing the words for 'A Song for London Bridge', a piece for saxophone and choir and organ. It had its premiere on the 22nd of June at Southwark Cathedral with Harle on saxophone, the Kings College Choir, Cambridge conducted by Stephen Cleobury and the organ played by David Goode.

Pickard has worked throughout his career with many musicians including Alan Hull (of Lindisfarne), Peter Kirtley and Liane Carroll, Ben Murray and Rosie Doonan, Tarras, Paul McCartney amongst others.

References[link]

External links[link]

• mordentower.org
• An interview on Squire
• Ballad Of Jamie Allan
• Poetry Foundation

Edward Merton Dorn (April 2, 1929 — December 10, 1999) was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.

Overview[link]

Edward Merton Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois. He grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He attended a one-room schoolhouse for his first eight grades. He later studied at the University of Illinois and at Black Mountain College (1950-1955). At Black Mountain he came into contact with Charles Olson, who greatly influenced his literary worldview and his sense of himself as poet. Dorn's final examiner at Black Mountain was Robert Creeley, with whom, along with the poet Robert Duncan, Dorn became included as one of a trio of younger poets later associated with Black Mountain and with Charles Olson.^[1]

In 1951, Dorn left Black Mountain and traveled to the Pacific Northwest, where he did manual labor and met his first wife, Helene; they returned to the school in late 1954. After graduation and two years of travel, Dorn's family settled in Washington state, the setting for his autobiographical novel By the Sound (originally published as Rites of Passage), which describes the grinding poverty of life in "the basement stratum of society." In 1961 he accepted his first teaching job at Idaho State University, where he published the magazine Wild Dog. His first book of poetry, The Newly Fallen, was published by LeRoi Jones's Totem Press in 1961.

In 1965, with the photographer Leroy Lucas, Dorn spent the summer visiting Indian reservations for a book commissioned by William Morrow & Co. Press, The Shoshoneans. That fall, British poet and scholar Donald Davie invited him to join the faculty at the Literature Department he was creating at the new University of Essex. He spent most of the next five years in England, where he published several collections of poems and wrote Book 1 of Gunslinger. He also started working with Gordon Brotherston on translations from Latin American texts, solidified his close friendship with British poet J.H. Prynne, and met his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.

On returning to the United States, Dorn spent the '70s as an academic migrant, teaching at over half a dozen universities across the country. In San Francisco, he collaborated with the printer and artist team Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers on a number of projects, including the newspaper Bean News, the comic book format of Recollections of Gran Apachería, and the typsetting of the complete Gunslinger in 1974. In 1977 Dorn accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he taught for the rest of his life, directing the Creative Writing Program and editing the literary newspaper Rolling Stock (motto: “If It Moves Print It”) with Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. During the '90s, after a teaching exchange visit to Paul Valery University in Montpellier inspired an interest in the Cathars of Southern France, he started working on Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics. He was also writing another long narrative poem Westward Haut. During the last two and a half years of his life, he wrote the poems for the posthumously published Chemo Sabe, reporting on his cancer treatments.

Dorn's main work, his magnum opus, is Gunslinger. Gunslinger is a long poem in five sections. Part 1 was first published in 1968, and the final complete text appeared in 1974. Other important publications include The Collected Poems: 1956-1974 (1975), Recollections of Gran Apacheria (1975), Abhorrences (1989), High West Rendezvous: A Sampler (1997), and [Way More West: New and Selected Poems] (2008).

Popular horror novelist Stephen King admired Dorn, describing his poetry as "talismans of perfect writing" and even naming the first novel of The Dark Tower series, "The Gunslinger," in honor of Dorn's poem.^[2] King also opened both the prologue and epilogue of "The Stand" with Dorn's line, "We need help, the Poet reckoned."^[3]

Dorn died of pancreatic cancer on December 10, 1999 in Denver, Colorado. His papers are collected at the University of Connecticut as well as at Indiana University at Bloomington.

Dorn's teaching career[link]

During his life, Dorn taught at a number of institutions of higher learning, including Idaho State University at Pocatello (1961-65); the University of Essex, Great Britain (1965-1970) as a Fulbright lecturer; Northeastern Illinois University at Chicago (1970-1971); Kent State University, Ohio (1973-74); and the University of Colorado (1977-1999). His second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, is an Englishwoman he met during his Essex-years.

In the early 1970s, as a visiting poet at Kent State University, Dorn, along with British poet and editor Eric Mottram, was a mentor and supporter of the musical group Devo, and its founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis.

Works[link]

Poetry[link]

• 1961: The Newly Fallen, Totem Press, New York.^[4]
• 1964: Hands Up!, Totem Press, New York.^[4]
• 1964: From Gloucester Out, Matrix Press, London (U.K.).^[4]
• 1965: Idaho Out, Fulcrum Press, London.^[4]
• 1965: Geography, Fulcrum Press, London.^[4]
• 1967: The North Atlantic Turbine, Fulcrum Press, London.^[4]
• 1968: Gunslinger, Black Sparrow Press^[4]
• 1969: Gunslinger: Book II, Black Sparrow Press^[4]
• 1969: The Midwest Is That Space Between the Buffalo Statler and the Lawrence Eldridge, T. Williams^[4]
• 1969: The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot, Cottonwood^[4]
• 1969: Twenty-four Love Songs, Frontier Press^[4]
• 1970: Gunslinger I & II, Fulcrum Press, London.^[4]
• 1970: Songs Set Two: A Short Count, Frontier Press, ISBN 978-0-686-05052-0
• 1971: The Cycle, Frontier Press
• 1971: A Poem Called Alexander Hamilton, Tansy/Peg Leg Press^[4]
• 1971: Spectrum Breakdown: A Microbook, Athanor Books^[4]
• 1972: The Hamadryas Baboon at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Wine Press^[4]
• 1972: Gunslinger, Book III: The Winterbook, Prologue to the Great Book IV Kornerstone, Frontier Press^[4]
• 1974: Recollections of Gran Apacheria, Turtle Island^[4]
• 1974: Slinger (contains Gunslinger, Books I-IV and "The Cycle"), Wingbow Press^[4]
• 1975: With Jennifer Dunbar, Manchester Square, Permanent Press^[4]
• 1975: Collected Poems: 1956-1974, Four Seasons Foundation^[4]
• 1978: Hello, La Jolla, Wingbow Press,^[4] ISBN 978-0-914728-24-5
• 1978: Selected Poems, edited by Donald Allen, Grey Fox Press^[4]
• 1981: Yellow Lola, Cadmus Editions^[4]
• 1983: Captain Jack's Chaps—Houston/MLA, Black Mesa Press^[4]
• 1989: Abhorrences, Black Sparrow Press^[4]
• 1993: The Denver Landing, Uprising Press^[4]
• 1996: High West Rendezvous: A Sampler^[4]
• 2001: Chemo Sábe, Limberlost Press^[4]
• 2007: Way More West: New & Selected Poems, edited by Michael Rothenberg, Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-14-303869-6 (posthumous)

Translations[link]

• 1968: With Gordon Brotherston, Our Word: Guerilla Poems From Latin America, Grossman^[4]
• 1969: With Gordon Brotherston, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Tree Between Two Walls, Black Sparrow Press^[4]
• 1976: With Gordon Brotherston, Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo, Penguin^[4]
• 1979: With Gordon Brotherston, Image of the New World Thames & Hudson^[4]
• 1999: With Gordon Brotherston, Sun Unwound: Original Texts from Occupied America, North Atlantic Books,[4] anthology

Prose, Fiction & Essay[link]

• 1960: What I See in the Maximum Poems, Migrant Press (criticism)^[4]
• 1964: Michael Rumaker and Warren Tallman, Prose 1, Four Seasons Foundation^[4]
• 1965: The Rites of Passage: A Brief History, Frontier Press^[4]
• 1966: The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau, Morrow,^[4] 66 pages
• 1969: Author of introduction, The Book of Daniel Drew [written in 1910 by Bouck White], Frontier Press^[4]
• 1969: By the Sound, Frontier Press; republished with a new preface by the author, Black Sparrow Press, 1991^[4]
• 1971: Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World (short stories), Frontier Press^[4]
• 1972: Bean News (newspaper, various authors, the 'secret book' of Gunslinger), Zephyrus Image^[5]
• 1976: The Poet, the People, the Spirit, Talonbooks^[4]
• 1978: Roadtesting the Language: An Interview with Ed Dorn,UC, San Diego^[4]
• 1980: Interviews, Four Seasons Press^[4]
• 1980: Views, Four Seasons Press^[4]
• 1993: Way West: Stories, Essays and Verse accounts, 1963-1993, Black Sparrow Press, includes the previously published (1974), Recollections of Gran Apacheria^[4]
• 2007: Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes, edited by Joseph Richey, University of Michigan Press ISBN 978-0-472-06862-3 (posthumous)

Further reading[link]

• Beach, Christopher (1992) ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition, University of California Press.
• Clark Tom (2002) Edward Dorn: A World of Difference. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
• Elmborg, James K (1998) A Pageant of Its Time: Edward Dorn's Slinger and the Sixties. Studies in Modern Poetry, Vol. 6, Peter Lang Publishing, New York.
• Levy, William (20 January 2000) "Death of a Gunslinger: An Obituary on Ed Dorn for America." Exquisite Corpse, Issue 4.
• McPheron, William (1989) Edward Dorn. Western Writers Series #85, Boise State University.
• Paul, Sherman (1981) The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
• Spitzer, Mark (1996) Dinner with Slinger, in Thus Spake the Corpse, An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998, Vol. 2 - Fictions, Travels & Translations (Codrescu, A and Rosenthal, L, eds.) Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press.
• Spitzer, Mark (1999) "Transcript of an Ed Dorn Rant" Jack Magazine, Issue 4.
• Streeter, David ed. (1973) A Bibliography of Ed Dorn. New York: The Phoenix Bookshop.
• Wesling, Donald, ed. (1985)Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Ed Dorn. University of California Press

References[link]

External links[link]

• Works by or about Ed Dorn in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• In Remembrance of Ed Dorn Edited by Dale Smith. Contains a chapbook of poetry by Dorn called LOW COUPS AND HAUT COUPS. This site also features essays and remembrances by John Herndon, Stefan Hyner, Reno Lauro, Alice Notley, Richard Owens, and Claudia Moreno Pisano
• Edward Dorn @ centomag.org
• Preface to "Edward Dorn, American Heretic" (Chicago Review 49:3/4-50:1)
• From Gloucester Out
• Three poems
• Ed Dorn at the EPC
• The Ed Dorn papers
• "The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot" poem 1969
• Chemo Sábe α Edward Dorn publisher's site feature's a piece on "...Dorn's last collection of poems, written while battling cancer and the drugs he took to fight the disease."
• Ron Silliman on Dorn & Way More West: New and Selected poems poet Ron Silliman discusses Dorn in the context of this posthumously published "selected poems". (from Silliman's blog, entry for Tuesday, March 20, 2007)
• Deep in Dorn Country: stepping into the poetry of Ed Dorn Rob McLennan's blog entry here provides another jumping off point for Dorn, including more useful links on the web. See also McLennan's entry here July 22, 2006 for a further discussion of Dorn
• "What is not permitted is recognition": Dorn visits "Dog" poet Stephen Baraban quotes extensively from a Dorn reading/visit/lecture during the school year 1979-80 at SUNY Buffalo: "Dorn was one of the best & most focused of all the visitors. His sly discourse, and the subsequent Q&A, was gripping--he had come carefully prepared with striking contentions".
• Ed Dorn's Theatre of Impatience, a short essay by John Muckle from PN Review

Strung Out is a Californian punk rock band from Simi Valley, California, formed in 1989.^[1] They are known mainly for their musical style, which fuses aspects of punk rock and heavy metal to form their primary sound. They have released seven albums on Fat Wreck Chords and appeared on numerous compilations and skate/surf videos. They have played on the Warped Tour and continue to tour internationally.

Biography[link]

The band formed in 1989 in Simi Valley, California. The original lineup consisted of vocalist Jason Cruz, guitarists Jake Kiley and Rob Ramos, bassist Jim Cherry and drummer Adam Austin. After releasing a self-titled 7" record, they became one of the first bands to be signed to Fat Wreck Chords, the record label owned and operated by Fat Mike of the band NOFX. Austin left the band in 1992 and was replaced by Brad Morrison who also left the band and was replaced on drums by Jordan Burns, formerly of fellow Simi Valley natives Ten Foot Pole. Their first album, Another Day in Paradise, was released in May 1994. Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues followed in 1996. In 1998 they released The Skinny Years...Before We Got Fat, a compilation album of their pre-Fat Wreck Chords material.

The band showed notable musical growth on their 1998 album Twisted by Design, which was both speedy and technical but also with darker overtones. The album established a mixture of the fast, poppy sound the band had established with Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues but mixed it with more atonality and more abstract song structures.

Bassist Jim Cherry left the band in 1999 and went on to play in Pulley and Zero Down, but died of heart failure in 2002. He was replaced by Chris Aiken, whose musical background had a strong impact on the 2000 album The Element of Sonic Defiance.

In 2002 the band released their fourth full-length album An American Paradox, their first release to appear in the Billboard 200. The initial production run contained a bonus song entitled "Don't Look Back". A video was filmed for the song "Cemetery" and was included on several punk rock video compilations. In 2003 they recorded and released a live album as part of the Fat Wreck Chords Live in a Dive series. Exile in Oblivion, was released in 2004, with a video filmed for the song "Analog." Strung Out released their sixth full-length album, Blackhawks Over Los Angeles on June 12, 2007.

While on tour with Evergreen Terrace in the fall of 2007 in Philadelphia PA, the band's van was stolen, which contained their equipment, merchandise, and personal belongings. The band continued the tour, traveling and playing with instruments provided by supporting acts I Am Ghost and Evergreen Terrace. Notably, this happened to ska/punk act Suburban Legends at the same hotel.

When they are not touring or making music, Jason Cruz enjoys life as an artist, Jordan is a co-owner of Moto XXX along with NOFX drummer Erik Sandin. Rob Ramos works in the film industry, and Jake gives occasional musical lessons.

In March 2009, Strung Out released a collection of rarities & b-sides entitled Prototypes and Painkillers. The album will be the second such compilation from the band who previously compiled material on The Skinny Years: Before We Got Fat in 1998.

On September 29, 2009, Strung Out released their 7th studio album titled Agents of the Underground. This has a less political tone to it than their previous one, and it also combines more of the old fast sound with heavy metal influences.

July 19, they are releasing a compilation album named "Top Contenders: The Best Of Strung Out". In it are remastered versions of 23 songs, and 3 new songs; "City Lights", "Saturday Night", and "Here We Are".^[2]

Band members[link]

Current members[link]

• Jason Alexander Cruz - vocals
• Jake Ira Kiley - guitar
• Rob Ramos - guitar
• Chris Aiken - bass
• Jordan Burns - drums

Past members[link]

• Jim Cherry - bass (1989–1999) (d. 2002)
• Adam Austin - drums (1989–1992)
• Brad Morrison - drums (1992–1993)

Discography[link]

Studio Albums[link]

• Another Day in Paradise (1994)
• Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues (1996)
• Twisted by Design (1998)
• An American Paradox (2002)
• Exile In Oblivion (2004)
• Blackhawks Over Los Angeles (2007)
• Agents of the Underground (2009)

7"s and EPs[link]

• "Somnombulance" 7" first ever recorded
• Strung Out 7"
• split 7" with Jughead's Revenge
• split 7" with Blount (1995)
• Crossroads and Illusions (1998) CD-EP
• The Element of Sonic Defiance (2000) CD-EP
• Fat Club 7" (2001)

Compilations, Soundtracks, and Live Albums[link]

• The Skinny Years...Before We Got Fat (1998)
• Live In A Dive: Strung Out (2003)
• Prototypes and Painkillers (2009)
• Top Contenders - The Best of Strung Out (2011)

Non-album tracks and B-sides[link]

• Punk Sucks compilation (1995) - "Support Your Troops"
• Split 7" with Blount (1995) - "Somnombulance" (demo version)
• Punk Bites compilation (1996) - "Wrong Side Of The Tracks" (demo version)
• The Fearless Flush Sampler compilation (1997) - "Jacqueline" (Jackie O demo version), "Season Of The Witch"
• Punk Bites Vol. 2 compilation (1997) - "Just Like Me" (demo version)
• Fat Music Vol. III: Physical Fatness compilation (1998) - "Ultimate Devotion" (demo version)
• The Show soundtrack (1998) - "Betrayal"(old version)
• As a Matter of Fact compilation (1998) - "Jacqueline" (Jackie O demo version), "American Lie," "Through Your Fingers"
• Before You Were Punk 2 compilation (1999) - "Every Breath You Take" (originally performed by The Police)
• Short Music for Short People compilation (1999) - "Klawsterfobia"
• Fat Music Vol. V: Live Fat, Die Young compilation (2000) - "Novacain"
• Punk Goes Metal compilation (2000) - "Bark at the Moon" (originally performed by Ozzy Osbourne)
• Beyond Cyberpunk compilation (2001) - "Betrayal" (new version)
• Fat Music Vol. VI: Uncontrollable Fatulence compilation (2001) - "Your Worst Mistake"
• Punk Goes Acoustic compilation (2003) - "Velvet Alley" (acoustic version)
• Rock Against Bush, Vol. 1 compilation (2004) - "No Voice of Mine" (demo version)
• Crusty Demons of Dirt: the Soundtrack (2004)
• Punk Rock Mixtape 2006 compilation (2006) - "Analog" punkradiocast.com
• Edge 103.9 (Acoustic Live & Rare Compilation) (2006) - "Angeldust" (acoustic version)
• Kingrock Entertainment, Listen Up, Vol. #1 - "All the Nations" http://www.interpunk.com/item.cfm?Item=69240&

Videography[link]

Music videos[link]

• "Bring Out Your Dead" from Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues - appears on Peepshow VHS (Fat Wreck Chords 1997)
• "Mind Of My Own" from Twisted By Design - appears on Peepshow Vol. 2 VHS (Fat Wreck Chords 1998)
• "Cemetery" from An American Paradox - appears on Peepshow Vol. 3 DVD (Fat Wreck Chords 2003) and Cinema Beer Buddy DVD (Hopeless Records 2002)
• "Analog" from Exile In Oblivion
• "Calling" from Blackhawks Over Los Angeles
• "Carcrashradio" from Agents Of The Underground
• "City Lights" from Top Contenders

Charts[link]

Album - Billboard (North America)

• Peak Position: The Billboard 200 #185 in 2002]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Strung Out on Myspace
• Review on Prototypes And Painkillers / source: www.Punk76.com
• Interview and arm wrestle with Jason and Jordan
• Fat Wreck Chords – Strung Out's record label
• Strung Out cover feature (Distorted online punkrock magazine)
• Interview with Strung Out (audio format only
• Our second interview with Strung Out
• Strung Out interview May 2009
• Skratch Magazine: article
• Concert live wire: interview
• Interview at The Land Salmon
• Interview with Chris Aiken
• Interview With Jake Kiley

Tom Raworth, photographed by Gloria Graham during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003

Tom Raworth (Thomas Moore Raworth) (born 1938) is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.

Early life and work[link]

Raworth was born and grew up in London. He left school at the age of sixteen and worked at a variety of jobs. In the early 1960s he started a magazine called Outburst in which he published a number of British and American poets including Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones. He also founded Matrix Press at this time, publishing small books by Dorn, David Ball, Piero Heliczer and others.

In 1965,while working as an operator at the international telephone exchange, Raworth and Barry Hall set up Goliard Press (later Cape Goliard), which published, amongst others, Charles Olson's first British collection. These ventures into publishing made a major contribution to British interest to the new American poetry of the 1960s.

Development as a poet[link]

His first book, The Relation Ship (1966), won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. Donald Davie admired the book and encouraged Raworth to resume his formal education. Raworth attended the University of Essex from 1967–70, though he grew bored with formal study and never completed the course he had originally signed up for. Raworth studied Spanish for a year and then translated the work of Vicente Huidobro and other Latin American poets for his M.A..

In the 1970s, he worked in the United States and Mexico, first teaching in universities in Ohio, Chicago and Texas, and later living in San Francisco where he was involved with the Zephyrus Image press. After six years abroad he returned with his family to England in 1977 to take up the post of resident poet in King's College, Cambridge for a year. In 2007 he was awarded the Antonio Delfini prize for lifetime achievement, in Modena, Italy. He now lives in Brighton, Sussex.

His early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain and New York School poets, particularly Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with strands from European poetry (Apollinaire), Dada, and Surrealism. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed—after Ace came Writing (composed 1975–77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978–81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982–83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007), Let Baby Fall (2008) and Windmills in Flames (2010). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, and a collection of prose Earn your Milk was published in 2009 which includes the uncategorizable long out-of-print A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.

Several boxes of Raworth's notebooks, typescripts, and correspondence (ca. 1968–1977) are held at the University of Connecticut's Dodd Research Center.^[1]

Performance and collaboration[link]

Raworth gives regular readings of his work in Europe and the U.S.A. and most recently in China and Mexico. He has made a number of recordings and videos. His readings are noted for his speed of delivery. He has long been interested in collaborative work and has created performance events and texts in collaboration with musicians such as Steve Lacy, Joëlle Léandre, Giancarlo Locatelli, Peter Brötzmann and Steve Nelson-Raney; other poets, including Jim Koller, Anselm Hollo, Gregory Corso, Dario Villa and Franco Beltrametti; and painters including Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaëla Henich. In 1991, he was the first European writer in 30 years to be invited to teach at the University of Cape Town and he has taught occasional semesters in the United States. He has also worked with his wife, Val Raworth.

His visual art consists mainly of drawings, collage and found art and has been exhibited in Italy, France, South Africa, and the United States.

Raworth and Ireland[link]

Raworth has strong Irish connections. His mother's family lived in the same house in Dublin as Sean O'Casey at the time that the playwright was working on Juno and the Paycock. In 1990, he took out an Irish passport.

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• Black Mountain poets
• British Poetry Revival
• Language Poetry
• New York School

External links[link]

• Raworth at EPC (includes extensive bibliography)
• "Tom Raworth", 9th International Literature Festival Berlin
• Tom Raworth's Home Page
• "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Tom Raworth participated in

References[link]