William Irwin Thompson World Wide Website

In RiRa's Irish Pub

This pint glass

has no fondling curves,

no female waist

to welcome fingers

treasuring the heft,

the partner's pas de deux

lift into the amber light,

the foam-kissed lips

of body raised in offering--

a memory lifted out

of bog-darkened water

around the brain's recesses--

curved, curtós, cur-tossed,

the Tollund bog man,

a scapegoated redeemer of past time

with cap and cord still around his neck;

its straight lines are abstracted thought,

a merely linear act of insertion,

without all the crevices

for touch and lips

in a gift of tongues.

Consider the squat

conventional Portland ferries

through this other glass.

Also uncurved,

unstreamlined,

built to be slow

as the lift of a pint,

they look made out of Leggos,

squared for easy adhesions,

to hold and to last.

And why not?

Paper clips and staples--

practical objects that serve to link

readings' odds and ends--

are still around with ipods.

I take note of things

that have been around

as long as I have.

Thompson's work has recently been featured in the new on line international literary magazine Wild River Review. A long poem on Western Civilization, (Canticum, Turicum) begins with folktales and traces of Charlemagne in Zurich and ends with the completion of Western Civilization as expressed in Finnegans Wake and the traces of James Joyce in Zurich. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/3-poetry_canticum.php) The first section, "Images of History," was published in London in the Spring 2000 issue of The Temenos Academy Review, (http://www.temenosacademy.org/temenos_journal.html) and the middle section, "The Latin Hinge," was published in the Winter 2005 issue of The Bucks County Writer. The complete text of Canticum, Turicum was published in The Wild River Review http://www.wildriverreview.com/, in 2006 and this publication included a Profile and Interview. The work will appear in hard copy with Wild River Books (Princeton, NJ) in the fall of 2008. Seven poems from his chapbook, Still Travels have been published in the Autumn, 2006 issue of Elixir: Consciousness, Conscience, and Culture (New Lebanon, New York); the complete text was published in Wild River Review in January of 2008. http://www.wildriverreview.com/poetry_stilltravels.php A Diary of Sorts and Streets (poetry) has been published by Onteros Press of Santa Fe in 2007.

Thompson's poem to President Bush was chosen by Sam Hamill for inclusion in his 2003 anthology, Poets Against the War, (http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=4442).

Thompson's essays on the philosophy of science and the evolution of consciousness have been appearing regularly in the Journal of Consciousness Studies http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.html and have been subsequently published in book form as Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture by Imprint Academic in England in 2004; an expanded edition with four new essays will be published in 2008.

Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995, he designed an Evolution of Consciousness Curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and served as Founding Mentor to 2005. (http://www.ross.org/podium/default.aspx?t=36398) Thompson became nationally known for his best-selling book, At the Edge of History, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986 for his science fiction fantasy novel, Islands Out of Time. As a cultural historian, he is most widely known for his book, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. As a philosopher of science, he is known for his three books, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, Gaia, A Way of Knowing, and Gaia Two: Emergence, the New Science of Becoming. (See "The Gaian Politics of William Irwin Thompson" in Earth Light Magazine. http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html) In 1996 he published Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, followed by an expanded paperback edition in 1998, and in 1997 he published Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart: Collected Poems, 1959-1996. In 1972, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association as an alternative way for the humanities to develop in a scientific and technical civilization. Lindisfarne became an association of scientists, artists, scholars, and contemplatives devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture. Lindisfarne began its activities in Southampton, New York in 1973, moved to Manhattan in 1976, and, finally, to Crestone, Colorado in 1979 where today the Lindisfarne Fellows Retreat and the Lindisfarne Chapel are under the ownership and management of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center.(http://www.dharmasangha.com/index.html) In 1997, Thompson retired from the presidency of the Lindisfarne Association; at the request of the Fellows, in 2007 and 2008, he organized Lindisfarne Fellows conferences in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He now devotes himself to writing essays and poetry, and giving talks and poetry readings. (See "The Cultural Phenomenology of Literature" at http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/ltonword/part4/thompson/cover.htm) (Contact: P. O. Box 5202, Portland, Maine 04101; towit@williamirwinthompson.org.)