An interesting little blog called WeelittleBeasties has given my poem “Mouse” a home. Happy to see it in such a nest of mouse lovers. The owners of the beasties site would have probably loved to have been standing with me in Idabashi Station, Tokyo, recently when a heavy rain outside inspired a group of rats to enter the station through the drain pipes and play on and under the train tracks in a rather kittenish way. I pointed them out to a middle-aged lady standing near me and she told me that these near-foot-long specimens were small compared to the rats in Nagano. The train arrived and the rats looked up and merely ducked as the heavy wheels rolled over them and the train obscured their games from our view. Cute!

On a different note: Rod Summers sent me his remix of electronic and acoustic sounds and sound poetry titled Tacky’s Gothic Snowdrop. He and Munich audio whiz Tom Winter recorded the material way back in 1976 “with seven guests in a wooden-roomed floor in a room in Maastricht.” The material has been mastered and remastered, and finally digitally well-done. The result is an interesting exploration of ambient sound. Rod Summers and Tom Winter are well known for their audio work and have produced a whole series under the VEC logo. In addition, Rod is the captain of the Paradise Police unit of Sound Poets, which includes myself and other luminaries from Europe, South America, the U.S. and other Realms of Being.

For a catalogue of VEC productions, write to:

Rod Summers/VEC
Cantecleerstraat 40
NL-6217 BX MAASTRICHT
The Netherlands

The sky’s starting to lighten here in Shin-Urayasu, Japan, and a bird is singing in a tree. I can’t identify its song, but it’s truly fetching in its on-again, off-again manner.

Time to say thanks to a few people:

Thanks to Lou Rowan and Jerome Rothenberg of Golden Handcuffs for giving “The Passion of Phineas Gage” a fine home. I’ve just received the Summer issue and it’s a beauty.

Thanks and happy birthday to Hugh Seidman! Hugh has expressed interest in working with us on a future ahadada on-line chapbook. It would be an honor to number Hugh among our authors.

Thanks to Dan Waber–visual poet–for adding a link to my Complete Mans’ Wows to his Altered Books website.

Thanks for the good note from the editor of Unarmed. (We aim to please!) We hope the editor takes a look at our other comment regarding his interesting journal.

Thanks to Eileen Tabios for her nice notes over the past year. We’re happy the work is out there too!

Thanks and congratulations to the newly-wed Dan Sargent of the Road to Excess Books. We wish him and his new bride all the best.

Thanks to the St. Marks Poetry Project and Ron Silliman for adding our blog to their listings.

Thanks to all those folks out there reading what we have to say, buying our books and down-loading our offerings.

And thanks to Dan Sendecki for hammering away at the books and keeping this website up and going from far away Burlington! His blog postings are always things of beauty, so I tip-toe around them for two or three days before posting mine!

Future plans for ahadada include an internet radio with 24 hour poetry readings. We’ll be looking for tapes and Cd’s of material in the near future. Skip Fox’s book is almost ready to go to press and Dave Kennedy’s stunning visual-verbal collaboration with his wife will be the next down-loadable offering from this site.

The sun has almost risen now, but I have another five hours before heading off to work. It’s back to Colin Wilson’s autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose. More on that book soon.