Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor, poet and author Steve Abee .
STEVE ABEE was born in Santa Monica, California and began writing after high school when he held a job as an orderly at St. John’s Hospital. His mind started to unfold itself and he thought if he was going to save it, he had better start writing things down. Abee recalls, “I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all.”
Abee writes in the American lyric tradition of Whitman and Kerouac yet as numerous fans remark, experiencing Abee perform his work in person is like attending a university lecture if Iggy Pop was the professor! Suffice it to say, Abee is his own kind of American Literary experience. His work seeks the ecstatic universal in the common grains of the day. Beck Hansen has called Abee “the love-powered bull horn blasting down from the altitudes,” and Lydia Lunch has remarked that his “savage poetry demands the reader to devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated.”
He holds a MFA in Fiction and Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles and just released a new poetry collection, Great Balls of Flowers on Write Bloody books. Also his novel, Johnny Future, is coming out with MacAdam/Cage in the Fall of 2010; Other titles include The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit (Phony Lid Books), and King Planet (Incommunicado), a collection of short stories and poems.
He lives and teaches in Los Angeles.
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