Welcome To The Illiterate Poetry Blog

My name is: Robert Richard Eugene Geisen.

You can call me Rob. My life pt 1 took place on a farm in Springport Michigan. Constantly surrounded by flat mountains of space, I began obsessively playing the guitar when I was 15 and started playing in bar bands a couple years after that.  I lived rent free in a trailer shaped house that my family built on the edge of a corn field when I was a wee little baby. I made money playing in bars and giving guitar lessons, stuff like that. I majored in classical guitar and music theory in college.  I dug cats, not dogs.  Heavy Metal, not Disco. Twilight Zone, not Murder She Wrote.  Turn off's = yard work and Reba McEntire albums. Turn ons included pretty much every movie ever made and this really nice stripper who danced at this club my band Rampage! used to play at and who swore that her real name was Page.

I didn't start writing until I was in my early/mid twenties. The poem that made me go 'holy shit' and trade the guitar in for scribbling in notebooks was Richard Brautigan's The Beautiful Poem;

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking

         about you.

Pissing a few moments ago

I looked down at my penis

        affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside

you twice today makes me

         feel beautiful

My friends thought it was all bullshit but to me this was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. I carried it around with me everywhere I went like it was some sort of goddamned key because it was. It slit things wide open and I started reading everything Brautigan ever wrote and when I'd done that I moved on to Kerouac and the rest of the Beats. When I'd read the Beats I moved on to anything any of them had ever mentioned as being influential to them or important; Dostoyevsky and Babel and all the Russians, Breton and the Surrealists, the Lost Generation books, and also Rimbaud, and Blake, and Fante etc. I was hooked. I wrote three novels during this time, in large chunks unpublishable really, written mainly with the intentions of learning how to write.

My life pt 2. takes place after the death of Allen Ginsberg and the quitting of my job upon hearing the news and the moving west to Boulder, Colorado. A high school friend and one of my favorite bastards in the world, Tim Cowles, suggested Boulder based on a recent trip he'd taken and the fact that The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was there, which meant every summer the place was usually crawling with undead Beat writers, who would swing in to teach and bullshit and hang out. I'd never been to Boulder before but said fuck it, I dig Beat writers, and moved here anyway.

I never attended Jack Kerouac classes because I really fucking hate classes, but I did end up on my second day in town bumping into Robert Creeley, which was cool. I moved into a two window basement apartment and started getting more and more into poetry, reading at the weekly Penny Lane readings. The multi-talented musician/publisher/Orson Welles aficionado Tyler Burba was at one of these early readings and offered to publish my first book on Farfalla Press. We became pals and worked together designing book covers and collaborating on other Farfalla projects until he moved to New York to pursue a carrier in forming and recording with two of the most amazing bands ever to have been amazingly formed (Snowboots, Visit) and almost dating Al Franken's daughter. 

After that I went into business with another pal, the great Olatundji Akpo-sani. Together we took over hosting duties for the Wed night open mic's at Albums Bistro (now held at The Burnt Toast on the Hill) and started Baobob Tree Press. It is around this time that I also began working with all the glorious hoodlums that make up Illiterate Magazine.  I also write a lot these days under various character names which I won't list here right now.

I will obsessively watch and/or read pretty much anything. My hero's include Hunter S. Thompson, Mitch Hedberg, and Ed Wood. Favorite poets right now include Kenneth Patchen, Charles Bukowski, and Jeffery Miller. I love H.P. Lovecraft and Don Dellillo. Favorite two people writing comics these days = Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. Currently always listening to Ryan Adams and the Hunter S. Thompson tapes. Two favorite movies = Night of the Living Dead and King Kong.

I look forward to reading your work, so post it up there on the website you brilliant fuckers! When I'm not reading your stuff I also at times enjoy ending every sentence with an exclamation point! It's really fun! It makes me feel like Stan Lee!

Fuck. This little intro blog's getting a bit long, so for now let's just leave it at that.

iloveyou,

Rob