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Russell Thorburn and Gregory Ormson have worked together for over a decade writing original poems, prose, and music. Much of it happens in spite of distance and isolation. The seven songs/poems, posted for NATIONAL POETRY MONTH during April, are Ormson/Thorburn’s word/song series for the pandemic.

Isolated in an Upper Midwest studio, musicians record their work for “Mescalero Territory.” A sitar introduces the fever of an injured and isolated outlaw, holed up in a barn where Billy the Kid fights off rats and nightmares. The poet reads this story of “Mescalero Territory” to original sitar accompaniment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVeVBcoVlPU&app=desktop

Poem/song notes for number 2, “Mescalero Territory. ” Writer and reader, Russell Thorburn. Sitar, Gregory Ormson, Mixed Peter Gummerson @ Gummersound, Marquette, Michigan.… read more...

GREGORY ORMSON

Misfit Hearts by Russell Thorburn

(Rocky Shore Books, 2012) 90 pp. $16.00 (paper) ISBN 978-0-9823319-6-5.

In Thorburn’s five poetry works, I explore the poetic credo arising from his well-structured presentation of human tempest. In Thorburn’s first work, Approximate Desire, I saluted him for bringing both gravity and grace to us with words that moved me between blissful memories and heavy adult responsibilities. Some of the characters he chose to enliven those memories were Ty Cobb, Albert and Mileva Einstein, Apollinaire, Rilke. The baseball images are stunning: oracles rattling in the catcher’s mitt and the shame in baseball bats blindly stroking for the ball. Maybe they’re not on the field, but baseball leads to tears and I saw them in Approximate Desire.

Reviewing a second work, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, I bowed to him for “bringing it,” to use the sport show cliché. There, he portaled his ancestral stories through music, risk, generational angst and triumph. The poems celebrated many deaths, while along the way highlighted the erotic and its inner physics. His theology and psychology of the generation gap as the first spade-full of dirt that excavates family story, made sense to me. I’m familiar with a shovel, know how to dig, and feel the generation gap turned to bite. I understood his presentation of erotic quivering as the petite mort moving the world, I followed his sport and music angles, and my theological training alerted me to take seriously any writing working to exposes that gap (the generational one) as the first letter in the alphabet of the human condition.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: a poetry/song series the last 8 days of April. Number 2, “Mescalero Territory.”

Book Review of Misfit Hearts by Russell Thorburn

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