Bern Porter, American poet.
From his obituary:
"In his 93 years on this Earth, he contributed to the invention of television, worked on the Manhattan Project and the Saturn V rocket, and made the acquaintances of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Werner von Braun; published Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others, and knew Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Allen Ginsberg, and anyone else you might name; exerted a profound influence on the phenomenon known as mail art; traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on cruise ships; was married three times, once happily; spent several years in Guam; was an irascible crank; theorized a union of art and science called Sciart; was briefly committed to a mental institution; wrote more than 80 books, including important bibliographies of Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald; had a massive FBI file; lived and worked in Rhode Island, New York, Tennessee, California, Texas, Alabama; also Guam and Tasmania; at last settled in Belfast, Maine, where he ran for governor, served on the Knox County Planning..."I managed to locate an mp3 file of Bern Porter reading one of his last poems, and I have saved a copy at
http://www.londonelegance.com/misc/mp3/bp.mp3 - - Right click and select "Save target as..."
I can keep it there for only a while due to its size - 10meg.
Warning: it is brilliant post-modern poetry - it contains coarse language, it is treasonous, it is seditious, it is defiant, it is outrageous, and it's also wonderful!
