NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Alison Croggon has written poetry, prose and texts for theatre. Her published books are This is the Stone, The Blue Gate and Navigatio. She was the 2000 Australia Council writer in residence at Cambridge University. Forthcoming poetry books include November Burning (Vagabond Press), Attempts at Being (Salt) and Divinations (Arc Books, UK). Penguin Books will bring out her novel for young adults The Gift early next year.

Andrew Duncan grew up in Loughborough but lives in North London. author of various books of poetry (Cut Memories and False Commands, Alien Skies, Sound Surface, Anxiety before entering a room, Switching and Main Exchange, Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, Pauper Estate, etc.) Is working on two more Symbolic Machines and Savage Survivals.

Patrick Herron lives outside Chapel Hill, NC, US, where he earns his bread as a computer programmer and interface designer. Patrick's digital and textual works of poetry and visual art have appeared in places such as Rhizome.org, README, Oasia Press, VeRT, Rhizomes, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and in the recently released 100 Days: An Anthology, a collection of poems on the Bush presidency (Barque Press). Patrick has recently completed two volumes of poetry (one is a conceptual work, and the other is a loose collection). He is also now working on a poem-play loosely based upon Captain Ahab and Oedipus and is helping his friend Lester prepare a new web journal called The Close Quarterly (http://proximate.org/CloseQuarterly/).

Harriet Zinnes's many books include Plunge (a poetry chapbook), My, Haven't the Flowers Been? (poems), The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (short stories), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (criticism), and Blood and Feathers (translations from the French poetry of Jacques Prevert). She is a contributing editor of The Denver Quarterly and of The Hollins Critic and a contributing writer for New York Arts Magazine. She is Professor Emerita of English of Queens College of the City University of New York.

Ian Davidson was born in 1957 and has lived most of his life in Wales. He currently works at the University of Wales, Bangor. Recent work has appeared in the magazines The Gig and The Paper as well as issue one of A Chides Alphabet. Previous pamphlets include The Patrick Poems (Amra Imprint) and Human to Begin With (Poetical Histories). Harsh is forthcoming from Spectacular Diseases.

John Anderson was born in 1948 and grew up on an orchard in Kyabram, Victoria. In a writing career spanning 25 years, he published three volumes of poetry: the bluegum smokes a long cigar (Rigmarole, 1978), the forest set out like the night (Black Pepper, 1995), and The Shadow's Keep (Black Pepper, 1997). John Anderson died, after a short illness, in 1997 - not long after the publication of his third collection, The Shadow's Keep, which contained a series of lines retrieved from dreams and presented as one-line poems and pantoums. His acclaimed second book, the forest set out like the night had earlier brought his understandings and sensibilities to the forefront of contemporary Australian poetry. It is the belief of A Chide's Alphabet that his work deserves to be more widely known and remembered.
Both the forest set out like the night and The Shadow's Keep are available through Black Pepper, 403 St Georges Road, North Fitzroy, VIC 3068, Australia, tel: 00 613 9489 1716.

Mark Weiss is the author of three chapbooks and two collections of poems. He is and editor of Junction Press, for which he is currently preparing, with Harry Polkinhorn, a bilingual anthology of the poetry of Baja California, on Mexico's extreme northwestern frontier, and, with Alina Camacho-Gingerich, a bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry since 1943. A New Yorker for most of his life, he currently resides in San Diego, California.

Kent Johnson: along with the composer Javier Alvarez, Kent Johnson is the caretaker of Tosa Motokiyu's Araki Yasusada manuscripts. You can read a recent interview with Kent about issues related to Yasusada in VeRT #5. In 2002, University of California Press will be publishing Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz , a book he has co-translated with Forrest Gander. The pieces here in A Chide's Alphabet are from a manuscript of prosodic experiments entitled Letter from Jerome Rothenberg: Selected Post-Poems, 1998-2001.

Richard Dillon: 1990 Fellow in Poetry for The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Grolier Bookshop, night manager, 1974, hired by Gordon Cairnie, Cambridge, Massachucetts. Publications: "Art Creek", a collaboration with sculptor, Adrienne Heinrich, of Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, AAP Bulletin (2000). Conceived and produced "Live At The Ear" (edited by Charles Bernstein) a CD anthology of the original LanguagePoetry at New York's Ear Inn. Studied literature in Boulder, Colorado with William S. Burroughs, 1974 to 1985. "From Jackass Pass To Mt. Bonneville And Back" a journey into Shoshone country, Wyoming back country (Mountain Gazette, Aspen, Colorado, 1980). "Click! At The Cardoza Hotel" a literary probe of SoBe, models on the gold coast, Miami, Florida. (The Pittsburgh Quarterly, 1994)

Jill Jones is a Sydney poet and writer. Her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, won the Mary Gilmore Award in 1993 and her second book, Flagging Down Time, was published in late 1993 by Five Islands Press. The Book of Possibilities, published in 1997, was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Council 'Banjo' Awards, the 1997 Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize and the 1998 Adelaide Festival Awards. She was a co-editor of A Parachute of Blue, an anthology of recent Australian poetry (Round Table Publications, 1995). Her next book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems is due out from Salt Publishing in 2002.

Robin Hamilton: born in 1947, brought up mostly in Glasgow, taught English for twenty years at Loughborough University before retiring, early, to live the good life. Two children, one ex-wife, and a bonzai. The Lost Jockey: Collected Poems 1966-1982 published in 1985. Currently proprietor of The Phantom Rooster Press (printer extraordinary for HardChides). His exemplar is James Crichton ["The Admirable Crichton"] (1560-1582), Scottish poet, paragon and swordsman.

Robert Hampson co-edited ALEMBIC in the 1970s with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards. His most recent publications are ASSEMBLED FUGITIVES: SELECTED POEMS 1973-98 (Stride, 2000) and C FOR SECURITY (Pushtika, 2001). He currently runs (with Frances Presley) the TALKS series at Birkbeck College's Centre for Research in Poetics.

Tim Allen lives in Plymouth. Editor of Terrible Work (now going on-line as a poetry reviews magazine). Most of his material remains unpublished but two pamphlets have appeared, 'Texts For A Holy Saturday' (Phlebas '96) and 'The Cruising Duct' (Maquette '98) and his poetry has been featured in mags such as First Offense, Oasis and Shearsman. Essays have also appeared in 'Binary Myths' (Stride) and the recently issued magazine Eratica. The editor describes the work presented here as 'gritted teeth transcendence' and their author cannot argue with that.

Brian Fewster lives in Leicester and commutes to London, where he works as a programmer and technical author. He has been published in various poetry magazines and his first collection is ready for a discerning publisher to snap it up.

Dominic Fox lives with his partner and their son in Leicester , where he is still trying to complete his PhD dissertation on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. He currently works in a bank, and tries not to make too much of the fact that T. S. Eliot did too. His other favourite poet is Early Auden, and after some initial unpleasantness he is getting to quite like Milton as well.

David Bircumshaw is the editor of 'A Chide's Alphabet'. As above, he lives in Leicester, a habit which seems to be spreading among the contributors to this publication. To his considerable surprise, a collection, Painting Without Numbers, is forthcoming from the Phantom Rooster Press.

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