they hawk the littered red brick and cobbled streets,
beneath the low clouds and above the billowy trash
of Starbucks napkins and tumbling paper cups
or toddler-dropped french fries and red pizza crust.
They easily rise to the sky or descend to the street.
Perhaps, mon cher Baudelaire, the albatross
is not our semblable emblem anymore.
Now the seagull is our prince de nuées,
at once the sky's clochard and the streets' habitué.
Thompson's essays on the philosophy of science and the evolution of consciousness have been appearing regularly in the Journal of Consciousness Studies http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.html and have been subsequently published in book form as Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture by Imprint Academic in England in 2004; an expanded edition with four new essays will be published in 2008. Thompson's poem to President Bush was chosen by Sam Hamill for inclusion in his 2003 anthology, Poets Against the War, (http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=4442).
Thompson has recently completed a long poem on Western Civilization, (Canticum, Turicum) that begins with folktales and traces of Charlemagne in Zurich and ends with the completion of Western Civilization as expressed in Finnegans Wake and the traces of James Joyce in Zurich. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/3-poetry_canticum.php) The first section, "Images of History," was published in London in the Spring 2000 issue of The Temenos Academy Review, (http://www.temenosacademy.org/temenos_journal.html) and the middle section, "The Latin Hinge," was published in the Winter 2005 issue of The Bucks County Writer. The complete text of Canticum, Turicum was published in the inaugural issue of a new on line literary journal launched on February 15, 2006, The Wild River Review http://www.wildriverreview.com/, and this publication includes a Profile and Interview. The work will appear in hard copy with Wild River Books in 2008. Seven poems from his chapbook, Still Travels have been published in the Autumn, 2006 issue of Elixir: Consciousness, Conscience, and Culture (New Lebanon, New York); the complete text will be published in Wild River Review January 30, 2008. http://www.wildriverreview.com/poetry_stilltravels.php A Diary of Sorts and Streets (poetry) has been published by Onteros Press of Santa Fe in 2007.
Thompson
was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945,
where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and
Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to
study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship
to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his
doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The
Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. Thompson
has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His
interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied
anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and
cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of
religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic
Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984),
visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne
Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995, he designed
an Evolution of Consciousness Curriculum for the Ross School in East
Hampton, New York, and served as Founding Mentor to 2005. (http://www.ross.org/podium/default.aspx?t=36398)
Thompson became nationally known for his best-selling book, At the Edge
of History, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. He
received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986 for his
science fiction fantasy novel, Islands Out of Time. As a cultural
historian, he is most widely known for his book, The Time Falling
Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture.
As a philosopher of science, he is known for his three books, Imaginary
Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, Gaia, A Way of Knowing,
and Gaia Two: Emergence, the New Science of Becoming. (See "The Gaian
Politics of William Irwin Thompson" in Earth Light Magazine. http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html)
In 1996 he published Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the
Evolution of Consciousness, followed by an expanded paperback edition
in 1998, and in 1997 he published Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart:
Collected Poems, 1959-1996. In 1972, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne
Association as an alternative way for the humanities to develop in a
scientific and technical civilization. Lindisfarne became an
association of scientists, artists, scholars, and contemplatives
devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture.
Lindisfarne began its activities in Southampton, New York in 1973,
moved to Manhattan in 1976, and, finally, to Crestone, Colorado in 1979
where today the Lindisfarne Fellows Retreat and the Lindisfarne Chapel
are under the ownership and management of the Crestone Mountain Zen
Center.(http://www.dharmasangha.com/index.html)
In 1997, Thompson retired from the presidency of the Lindisfarne
Association; at the request of the Fellows, in 2007 and 2008, he
organized Lindisfarne Fellows conferences in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He
now devotes himself to writing essays and poetry, and giving talks and
poetry readings. (See "The Cultural Phenomenology of Literature" at http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/ltonword/part4/thompson/cover.htm) (Contact: P. O. Box 5202, Portland, Maine 04101; towit@williamirwinthompson.org.)
Thompson, lecturing at Lindisfarne, Southampton, NY, 1975 (Photo, Nina Hagen)
Lecturing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, 1994. (Photo: Bill Anderson.)
