russell thorburn

First poet laureate of Michigan's UP, NEA Fellow in poetry, author of Somewhere We'll Leave the World, and manuscript consultant for international and US poets.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Direct message me if you are a poet who wants his or her manuscript sequenced for future publication. As a manuscript consultant, I have helped dozens of poets become published in Canada and the USA. I have reasonable fees and will turn around your work in three weeks or less.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@paullynchwriter
Massive enjoyment reading Prophet Song! I am down to the last fifty pages and don't want it to end. Outside a blizzard in the Upper Midwest. A perfect day!

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Fiction for the Upper Midwest blizzard

The moon was marble over Lake Superior. The broken pickup made more metal sounds. Its engine was a complaining old man. Deep in my pocket loitered a copy of Celine's Castle to Castle...Louis-Ferdinand with his legendary dots...

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Brautigan looked down on the floor at the comic books, mostly Superman, some Mad Magazines. Death came to mind. All the blue endless rollers, the sharks that would eat his tuna if he ever had one on the line. --from
Richard Brautigan Climbing Out His Hotel Window

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

His nasal-sounding nose breathed ever so slightly, as if the merest touch could scare him awake from any dreams he was having. Let’s consider he was sleeping with May Pang in them, his slender Chinese girl with the fairly substantial bosom of a girl her age: twenty.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

The ghost of John Lennon got confused at his place of residence and asked for a bowl of chili beside me at the hotel bar. He had a bullet in his heart and nobody mourned more for him than me, a just-turned-thirty-young man who sang his death song going up the charts.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

It was interesting to be talking about Mao on a luxury motor launch with slipper lobsters and martinis. But then, Mao loved dance parties and seducing young nurses--hundreds of them, according to some accounts. --On Java Road, Lawrence Osborne, a novel set in Hong Kong.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Cold like a double-barrelled shotgun leans
against his chin, and he beholds the bold typed
address below his name, Jim Harrison, letters
fingered by his angry hands for dispatches
sent by his editor from Copper Canyon Press;
he wasn't going to change anything,

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Snow decorates his hands with its lace,
and he counts twenty familiar but different
patterns before he opens his mailbox.
Wind blows away the sand of his rock garden.
The last star of the evening bends its light
upon him, who's considering something Peruvian
or glazed with honey

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

Lillian Ross wrote an article on Hemingway stopping off en route to Italy with wife. The New Yorker, May 6, 1950. The Moods of Ernest Hemingway. His favorite painting at Met was El Greco's Toledo. Marlene Dietrich visited their hotel room for dinner. He had a decade to live.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

It was like being awake while you talk in your sleep. My brain was calm, without aches or any pressure, and my mood was clear and cloudless. I sailed off, and I made no move to stop myself. --Knut Hamsun, as real as ever in Hunger, page 85; translated by Robert Bly.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@RiekkiRon What's happening with your poetry book? Does Peter White have a copy? Jack Driscoll moved out east, but it's quite an honor for you to be paired with him as authors for Pushcart. I'll search for yours. I haven't seen Jack's yet either.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@RiekkiRon I am in good company here. Thanks. Two collections for 2024: Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, Let It Be Told in a Single Breath and WSU Press perhaps, Levon and the Mountain. Check out poem in North Dakota Quarterly, "When We Lived at the Old Hotel."

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@davdlee1 Did you see New Issues is defunct now? Did you know that was happening? I have to thank you for making my New Issues happen way back then. The English Major Is Dead, interesting New Yorker article in Feb 27 issue. Worth reading, as well as Worlds of Calvino.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@davdlee1 I enjoyed Glacier poetry. Complex and eerily beautiful in many poems. They whisper into your ear of another world. Is there a paper edition?

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

"End of Days" is a powerful short story of 1918 influenza and how people died. It is through the lens of Bernard MacLaverty, as he describes the fate of Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife Edith. From his new collection, Blank Pages. 1918 is always with us now.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@davdlee1 Things are always flying from my fingers, like car keys, and coffee tops, napkins. Perpetual motion. Thinking is useless, like desperately trying to remember a dream. The world is in movement. I enjoyed your poem.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

My grandfather died of influenza in 1918. He was a printer and never saw the birth of my mother. Ezra Pound published Pavannes and Divisions in 1918. Our library had a copy, and it was in my hands in 2018. Good condition too. I saved it from being purged. But then it was gone.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire. Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains," title from a 1918 poem by Sara Teasdale, written just after the start of the German offensive.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

North Dakota Quarterly Fall Winter 2022. I like the work in here, speaks to me of the Midwest. My poem is "When We Lived at the Old Hotel."

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@davdlee1 I don't see your last tweet. Cornerstone Press begins work on book in summer, and am waiting on Wayne State to respond to my book proposal. They requested it after learning Cornerstone took my other book.

[russell thorburn @antonvowldead]

@davdlee1 Not arson, dudes messing around with snowmobile inside one. It blew up and took out several units. Last dumpster gone, waiting for bulldozer. But we saved the essentials. Just endless hours of shifting.