About the Poets and the Artist
Prophecy, an editor's notes,
from guest editor Michaela Kahn
Prophecy and poetry, prayer and poetry, song and poetry: these used to be closer kin then they often are now.
Paul Celan, a Jewish survivor writing after WWII, struggled to make poetry in his native-language, German.
In the face of horror and perversion of his mother tongue he wrote that one must, “never leave the
depths and keep holding dialogue with the dark wellsprings.” What does one bring up, wet and crusted with salt,
from the wellsprings?
Perhaps prophecy is not so much predicting the future as it is seeing how unattended history continually resurrects
itself. I believe that looked at in a certain light, origin, science fiction, and myth all merge. A girl with an
elephant’s head, water that flows uphill, a rattling bathroom vent, flies trying to escape an apartment.
The stuff of this world, of the last, and of the next all mix, evolve, co-evolve. Tell us who we were, are,
who we are becoming.
Erling Friis-Baastad
Though born in Norway and raised in Virginia, Erling Friis-Baastad has spent most of his adult life in Canada's
Yukon Territory. He is employed as an editor at the
Yukon News in Whitehorse. His most recent book is
Wood Spoken:
New and Selected Poems (Northbound Press / Harbour Publishing, 2004).
Christien Gholson's poems and stories have appeared in
Hanging Loose,
Cimarron Review,
Mudlark,
Big Bridge,
2River,
Blue Mesa Review,
Lilliput Review, and
Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. A book of linked prose-poems,
On the Side of the Crow, was recently published by Hanging Loose Press (June 2006).
He lives in Santa Fe.
Michaela Kahn was born in the wastes of Los Angeles suburbia. From an early age she imagined that there must be a
way out. The map appears sometimes in a bared palm, sometimes within the lines of a poem, sometimes in the lichen
scrawl on a desert rock. Besides L.A. she has lived in Boulder, Nederland, (CO) Sacramento, Davis, (CA) and
Santa Fe (NM). Work has appeared in:
Puerto del Sol,
Red Rock Review,
Lilliput Review, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Kathleen McCloud lives and works in La Cieneguilla, New Mexico- 13 miles southwest of Santa Fe. Cienguilla is a
Spanish word for the 'little marsh' and it is in the murky wetlands of the desert that her inspiration desends
like a meteor or is dredged from the marsh.
Living things that defy the limitations of science inhabit the world created in Kathleen McCloud’s paintings
and mixed media works on paper. Species converge in environments where the fabric of life is a complex weave
of science and mythology and the only to navigational tools are metaphor, allegory and wonderful confusion.
This world emerges through the layering of materials such as paint, ephemera, oil stick, graphite and symbolic
language of the arts and sciences.
McCloud's work can be seen in Santa Fe at Ernesto Mayans Gallery and in Denver at the Sandy Carson Gallery.
