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Hero
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Words, Like Boulders Down a Mountainside
Speaking of schoolchildren 60 years ago, the great Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky said, "When they read to me poems that have been taught to them in school... they have been taught hackneyed lines, absurd rhythms, cheap rhymes. There are times when I could cry with disappointment."
Chukovsky would have loved Peter Nevland.
What Peter does with words is illegal in 7 states and under investigation in 17 more, but no one would ever call him malicious. It's merely the Huck Finn mischief in him that causes Peter to send an avalanche of mental images thundering at you like boulders tumbling down a mountainside. You dive, dodge and jump to keep from being buried under his mountain of reckless words only to find that each narrow escape puts you directly in the path of an even larger and more dangerous mental image.
I could give you an example but I won't, because reading a Peter Nevland poem is like watching a vacation video of your neighbor's trip to the Grand Canyon. But hearing Peter perform the same poem is like seeing the Grand Canyon for yourself. No... that's not quite it either. It's more like taking a running leap off the rim of the Grand Canyon with your hands tied behind your back so that the only way to pull the parachute's ripcord is with your toes.
Ted Pelton once described the writing of Jack Kerouac as "untutored prose... filled with neologisms, onomatopoeia, speed, rough edges, frazzled grammar. Plots--if they appear at all--give way to word-riffs on ideas as they arise." Pelton may just as well have been describing Peter Nevland. What Kerouac did to America 50 years ago, Nevland is doing today; the two men are similar in style and identical in spirit, except for one small detail; Jack Kerouac spent his life searching for what Peter Nevland has already found.
Ever notice how the hidden moral in a Dr. Seuss book is always extremely subtle? "Kids," Seuss said, "can see a moral coming a mile off and they gag at it." Consequently he allowed his story's morals to develop on their own, never were they forced or contrived. Peter Nevland's stuff is like Dr. Seuss' in that he opens our eyes without ever preaching. But where the good Doctor's friends included "a Bippo-no-Bungus from the wilds of Hippo-no-Hungus" and "a tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka from the African island of Yerka," Peter's friends are dope dealers and missionaries, bankers and bums, body-pierced wackos and cake-baking Moms, and he speaks of each with equal love.
Roy H. Williams
Feel like trying to pull a ripcord with your toes? Listen to Peter perform one of his poems in streaming audio. His CDs are available at www.WizardAcademyPress.com
"The creator of a new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between." - Gertrude Stein
~ Roy H. Williams
To view the archives click here.
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Invisible Heroes is a collection of more than 100 biographical stories written by Roy H. Williams, the Wizard of Ads. You can read a few of these stories in the archives of this web page, but most of them are inaccessible because they're soon to be published in a book.
We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they create us in their own image. Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They're the embodiment of all we're striving to be.
Do you want to be notified when Invisible Heroes is published? Give us your email address and we'll send you a note when the book is ready. (We solemnly swear not to let anyone else have your address. We detest spam as much as you do.)
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