For many years I have wanted to host some formal-friendly editors at the Lariat Board, and I've just never gotten the job done. Last October I got to know Tom Kerrigan in his role as guest editor of The Raintown Review, and gmail tells me we have exchanged 150 emails! So I've really gotten to know him. Below the link is his bio from:
http://www.thehypertexts.com/T.%20S.%20Kerrigan%20Poet%20Poetry%20Picture%20Bio .htm
"T. S. Kerrigan, aka Tom Kerrigan, has been published in The Formalist, Light, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Iambs & Trochees, Southern Review, Slant, International Poetry Review, Poetry Monthly, Kansas Quarterly, Pacific Review, Tennessee Quarterly, and many others. He has also read his poetry on NPR. A collection of Kerrigan’s poetry, Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone’s Pub and Other Poems, was published by The Inevitable Press in 1999. Kerrigan’s work was included in the Garrison Keillor anthology Good Poetry (Viking-Penguin, 2002). Kerrigan is also a theater critic, a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle, and the author of several plays, including “Branches Among the Stars” (Louisville, 1990). His plays have been produced in Los Angeles at the Ensemble Studio Theatre where he served as a member of the Board of Directors, and at the Globe Playhouse. He is also a past president of the Irish American Bar Association and once argued a case before the Supreme Court, which he won. His book The Shadow Sonnets and other poems is available from Scienter Press and can be ordered at
www.scienterpress.org.
Former Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur described Kerrigan's poetry as 'full of life, authority, playfulness, and good rhythms.'
X.J. Kennedy, former poetry editor of Paris Review, has hailed his work as a 'rich and vivid collection admirable for the verve of its language-handling.'"
Hypertext also carries seventeen of Tom's poems on the same page as this biography.
At the ripe young age of 68 Tom has just published My Dark People. In the Irish O' Ciaragain means "of the dark people." It's Tom's first trade book and makes me look a youngster who rushed into print. In the acknowledgements I count 52 journals all over the world which he credits with first publication of these marvelous poems written over many decades. The back of Central Ave. Press' handsome volume quotes another Irishman, me: "An Irishman, a Catholic, he has studied long at the singing school where Yeats is the cruel headmaster. Kerrigan's tenor has the register of John McCormack's."
The proprietor of Central Ave. Press, John Oelfke, is also proprietor of the Raintown Review. Nine of the 36 poets whose work Tom selected for this formal issue which should be in our mailboxes this week are Eratosphereans: Rhina Espaillat, Gail White, Moore Moran, A.E. Stallings, Jennifer Reeser, Alfred Nicol, Sam Gwynn, Dick Wilbur, Tim Steele, and yours truly. Sometime this weekend I will post an interview with Tom, and you're all welcome to join in. Areas of interest to me are what draws him as an editor? How can he stand being so Irish? What's he learned in the last five decades? For now, though, the best introduction to Tom is his poetry, and let's start with a short poem in demandingly short measure:
Be Thankful, Unicorn
Be thankful, Unicorn,
Your kind does not exist.
Chimera, Cyclops, Witch,
Your terrors live in dreams
An ancient mind conceived.
We wake to darker themes.
Be grateful, Basilisk,
Your sort was never born.
Behemoth, Dragon, Sphinx,
Be happy you're ideal.
These times engender forms
More terrible, more real.
[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited May 29, 2008).]