Artist photo by LAIRD PICKEREL.
____ In 1971 Don Paul was the youngest winner of a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Between 1973 and 1980 he was a logger or roughneck in northwest Washington, southeast Alaska, Louisiana and Texas. He qualified for the U.S. Men’s Olympic Marathon Trial in 1980 and 1988. In 1988 he began to put poems to music by his brother Kenton. Since then he's led or produced more than 20 recordings, including the Rebel Poets compilations and albums led by Glenn Spearman, Lisle Ellis, the Daughters of Yam, India Cooke, Paul Plimley, Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and Ben Goldberg.
____ Five more albums by him will be released in 2002--Love Is The Main Flame: Flowers Smell Of Gasoline: Fat Snake's Tongue Has Got Talking Heads: Watts In The Pot: and Punkinhead.
____ He works with the organizations Housing Is a Human Right and From the Ground Up in Bay View Hunters Point of San Francisco.
____ You can check out chapters from his new book, “ ‘9/11’ ” / Facing Our Fascist State “, at sfcall.com.
|
'Don Paul's Good Intentions proposes and explores the only kind of revolution that seems possible in North America in these days of Reaganocracy'--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
'I was moved deeply by Don Paul's poetry ... A way sane as dance'--Jeannette Armstrong
'Don Paul's essay leaves me with the feeling that, yes, Lawrence and Mann were giants who overarch our world of dwarfs and marionettes'--Malcolm Cowley
'The best sort of upbeat revolutionary sound'--Factsheet Five
'Deliciously seditious oral poetry'--Detroit Metro News
'Wildly interesting and truly unique'--Magpie Weekly (Sacramento)
'A real eye-opener'--Burning Toddlers (Arizona)
'Don Paul is a poet, pure of heart, who gives off a light that either blinds or illuminates'--David Rubien
'Read these poems and listen for the music that is there'--Matt Gonzalez
'Whether soccer-playing in Tanzania, punk-rocking in London in London, or logging in Alaska, Don Paul ... searches for--and, yes, even finds--spirit, noble effort, honesty, hope'--Amby Burfoot
'What a range of ideas and emotions.... You write pissed-off poems that flare and flame ... & then you turn around and write poems of such lyrical tenderness that somehow don't collapse into sentimentality that I am amazed'--Chuck Kinder
'A magnet for creative energy in the San Francisco Bay Area improvised music community'--Derk Richardson, San Francisco Bay Guardian
'One of the Bay Area's artistic treasures'--Wanda Sabir, San Francisco Bay View
"The hippest thing on Earth"--John Sinclair
|
|
_
