About the Poet
Martin Willitts Jr. is a Senior Librarian in New York. After a ten year break from writing, he has recent publications in Pebble Lake Review, Hurricane Blues (anthology), Slow Trains, Hotmetalpress.net, Haigaonline, Bent Pin, 5th Gear, and others. He has a fifth chapbook, Falling In and Out of Love (Pudding House Publications, 2005), an online chapbook, Farewell--the journey now begins (www.languageandculture.net, 2006), a full length book of poems with his art The Secret Language of the Universe (March Street Press, 2006), and he has another chapbook, Lowering the Nets of Light, forthcoming from Pudding House Publications. He won the 2007 Chenango County Council of the Arts Individual Artist Award, which he used to edit a poetry anthology about cancer Alternatives to Survival. He also judged the 2007 Hotmetalpress.net poetry chapbook contest.
Credits and Acknowledgments
The author offers grateful acknowledgment to the following publication in which the poems noted were originally published:
Hotmetalpress.net: "New Year’s Resolution"
Vermillion: "Why Do They Always Come During The Rainy Season?"
Scar.TV: "Goal Setting"
Hurricane Blues (anthology): "Hurricane Katrina"
Primal Sanities: "Walt Whitman among the Reaching Hands"
About the art: Several images are original paper art created by Martin Willitts Jr.. He makes origami, paper 3-D statues from a single piece of paper, pop-ups, and paper masks. He make two types of paper cutouts -- one is the familiar Victorian asymmetrical kind. The other is Chinese hau Yang style, based on Zen belief that the paper is alive, therefore the art looks like it is in motion, and when he cuts it out to make a positive/negative image it becomes Notan, which in Japanese means "light-dark."