[Norman Ball]

The Museum of American Poetics (MAP) has excerpted one of the six long-long-form essays that comprise my ms 'Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments'. The first half of the title is a Rilke quote whose poetry I cite extensively, as I do numerous other poets and cultural spokesmen, though as I recall not as copiously in this excerpt as elsewhere:

http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/ball2.htm

Seeking publisher...

take care
norm ball

[Vernon Sims]

Norman

I enjoyed this essay immensely. It is thought-provoking to say the very least. I am surprised that it has not found a publisher. Is there a place where I can read the other essays, as I would certainly be interested in reviewing it. I am working on some critical essays myself on the place of Poetry in modern culture and seeking out the issues confronting, poets, critics, and readers of poetry.. Contact me by PM if you want.

[Norman Ball]

Thanks so much Vernon. If you don't mind, I'll add a little more explanatory info here in case a publisher happens by, then drop you a private mail.

This is one of six 'long-form essays' to use that term very loosely that I wrote last year in sort of a three-month effusion, about 110,000 words in total, or maybe they're cultural collages that sort of orbit the arc of television. Then I realized everything orbits around the arc of TV nowadays so the book became about all things albeit in an abbreviated fashion.

To be honest, I've been too busy on other things to actively shop it around although I have a pitch, synopis, etc.

Early on, I enlisted my good friend Kirpal Gordon to serve as dialectician through the process as I found Ginsberg popping up with striking regularity. Kirpal was a Ginsberg/Naropa research assistant. Jim Cohn who runs the post-Beat clearinghouse MAP selected this essay for an excerpt. It may be the most propulsive of the six, sort of Ellroy-esque. Jim is another Naropa guy. So I was thrilled to get both these Ginsberg confidantes' imprimaturs as I take many liberties with old Allen.

As you mention poetry essays, many of mine appear here, and many of those are avaliable on the Internet. But I wouldn't let that detract from you buying the book

http://petroglyphbooks.com/index.php?id=7

take care
norm ball