William Gillespie is no slouch who neither was born yesterday nor fell off the turnip truck

William Gillespie is no slouch who neither was born yesterday nor fell off the turnip truck. He is exacting and professional. He knew a guy who goes to Brown. He wrote his entire masters thesis without once using the word "and." He tried to read Finnegan’s Wake, believing it the duty of every show-off. He also completed Hopscotch twice, using each of the two suggested orders of chapters. He finished Gravity’s Rainbow over the course of two years, and, with the wholesome ingenuous and earnest sincerity that has kept him barely employed, freely admits to not having understood the plot. He read Suttree straight through three times in two months and wrote his final paper for his degree about its narrative structure and why it made him cry. William Gillespie has never sent out a manuscript, this was his first time. He is too shy to write a manifesto. William Gillespie is a firm believer in irony and cannot tell the difference between a resume and a curriculum vita. He discovered 21-Consonant Poetry. He has taken a stand on many political issues which has led him to perform such works of terrorism as leaving poetry in grocery stores or in the stalls of mens rooms in major midwestern universities. He has a library so large he can never move and three cats named after important literary figures, such as La Maga. For a fictional character he has a firm handshake. This past decade, both times he was published he sent the first reader flowers. He has never to his knowledge been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant but has not let this setback discourage him completely. He proofread the Bible for sixty cents a page but wasn’t sure what to look for. He has probably waited on you or perhaps you have seen him asleep on your lawn. Sometimes he puts on soft music and writes pornography but this is admittedly infrequent. It is not uncommon for him to be adored at readings. He has never personally bombed Iraq and never will. Still, a lingering sentiment of responsibility makes him ask that 100% of his taxes go to social programs such as welfare, foodstamps, unemployment, and the NEA. He hopes you don’t find this offensive but if you do he would like to take your hand and, beneath constellations such as Libra, whisper to you his plan to give every homeless person a B-2 bomber to sleep in. His habits are ritual and pedantic and he has fondnesses for saffron, lemon grass, ginger root, mango, and gas station coffee. He publishes a newspaper called The Daily Poem which has a distribution of 3. He has managed, with the utmost perseverance, to quit being cynical. He is a failed suicide, but has learned to live with this. He wants to be seduced. He can loan you books that will tell you how. When he listens to people he listens. "Rapt" is a good word. He once, for nine months, wrote a poem a day about events in the news just to make himself feel better. He has never developed a beef habit. His phone is ringing right now but he is in the middle of this sentence and feels that you are more important than whoever could be calling. Unless it’s you. You should see him naked you have never seen anyone so thin. William Gillespie is a sharp dresser. He is underfunded like the rest of us. He can play ukelele at least as well as he can spell it.

He is a first place winner of the trAce/Alt-X hypertext competition as judged by Robert Coover. He has studied with David Foster Wallace, Curtis White, Lucia Cordell Getsi, Philip Graham, Patch Adams, and Herbert Brün. He has given workshops or performances at BRown University, New College (Sarasota), Hampshire College (Amherst), Coe College (Cedar Rapids), Illinois State University, and the Illinois Association of Teachers of English Conference. He has been published in Black Dirt, Montage, the Octopus, Druid’s Cave, Little America, Prairie Free Press, the Campus Guardian, the WEFT Revue, and Word Ways: the Journal of Recreational Linguistics. He currently hosts a radio program of the spoken arts on WEFT and works as a webmaster for the Department of Education. His goal is to get published and become a butterfly collector and insurance agent.

Information taken from http://www.newspoetry.com/

Academic year 2008/2009

Universitat de València Press

aconfer@alumni.uv.es