Stained Glass

M. Hill 2001

Light Study

Archie Texture

Self-portrait

Billy Dog 2002

Sky Over East Liberty

M. Hill 2005

October Tree

Mike Hill 2001

Nude (detail)

The Golden Ratio

My Muse Whispers

She whispers to me

Not angry not insistent.

Persistant lips brush my right ear

Waiting for thoughts to reach flood


When the levee breaks

Water surges from dark corners of mind

In a language I could understand

In a metaphor I own


After a day in the sun in the press

Thrilling to the din of achievement

Where are you when lights go down

Friends asleep bottles dry?


Does she mock your solitude

Or give her breast for your restless head?


Mike Hill

ceramic relief

by Maximum Traffic

Emerson

"Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Cabin on the Allegheny                                                                                                                                             M. Hill

Woodman

Buzz Buzzizzik

Your Household Bookcase

"The Life of Mayakovsky"

Wiktor Woroszylski

Grossman Publishers, Inc.

New York 1971

 

 

Self-portrait

                                                                            M. Hill

Derelict

by A. Modernman

Planet Dance, Mike Hill

Your Household Bookcase

"Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac"

Gerald Nicosia

Original publication by Grove Press 1983

Reprinted by University Of California Press 1994

 

   The image and legacy of Jean-Louis Kerouac are writ large upon American history, and not merely in the obvious areas of literature and popular culture. As another Beat biographer has noted, Jack Kerouac, along with his friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs tapped into the very essence of some important historical truths in the post World War II period, "verities far beyond the ken of the middle class."

  Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe stands as the most complete and exhaustive biography of the man and his times. Further, each of Kerouac's major works are highlighted and analyzed by the author with both perception and detail.
   
  As Jack's friend John Montgomery (the real-life Morley of The Dharma Bums) put it in the dedication of a book of essays about Kerouac addressed to Nicosia, the author of Memory Babe "took flak for the truth." Nicosia still is as witnessed by some truly unfortunate battles -- legal and otherwise -- with the family of Jack's last wife Stella. By all accounts, it would seem that the Sampas family (executors of the Kerouac estate, a fact that in itself has been questioned and challenged) is going about selling off anything and everything Kerouac came in contact with to the highest bidder while simultaneously giving Nicosia the bum's rush.

Johnny Depp may be in possession of Jack's old overcoat, but those who take the time to read Memory Babe will have something infinitely more valuable.

-Bob Schaeffer

Croquet

(Student Work)

                                                                                               Mike Hill

 

Pity

reprinted from Dale Luciano's Dada Gumbo

 

Found under West End Bridge, Pittsburgh

Your Household Bookcase

"Lives of the Poets"

copyrright 1998 by Michael Schmidt

Vintage Books/Random House

New York, 2000

 



Elegy For Butch Quinn, 1939-2006

Butch I’m writing this for you,

Who were an altar boy,

You, whose hero was Bo Diddly,

You, who as a young hot-rodder ran a Pennsylvania State Trooper off the road on

      Allegheny Avenue,

Who possessed an excessive fondness for alcohol and liked to fight

And got thrown out of bars,

You, whose visions cascaded before your eyes,

Whom someone called The Great Quinn,

Who dyed your white hair green for St. Patrick’s Day,

Who traded food stamps for beer,

Who called me an artist,

You were always glad to see me,

You, with whom I drank,

You, with whom I dreamed,

Whom I drove to the hospital one afternoon because your liver was doing flip-flops,

Who got sick in my car after an opening at the Meadville Market House,

Whose painting of an Indian I saw for sale on the sidewalk outside McArdle's gallery in Regent

      Square,

Who never stopped working even in the nursing home,

Who told me to keep the beads from Medjugorge for good luck even though I’m

      not Catholic;

None of these things were in your obituary.

                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                      Michael R. Hill

APOLOGY TO CONTRIBUTORS

  In 1990 I published Worker Poet #14, packaged contributors' copies and neglected to send them to some of the artists. Anyone who wishes may contact me for your payment with interest. I sincerely apologize.

Mike Hill

                                                                                                                                                   M. Hill 2003