~Michael Annis :: Founder, Senior Editor & Designer

As a partisan continually accelerating the nexus of profound cultural revolution, Michael Annis is the founder and senior editor at Howling Dog Press, publisher of many of the greatest poets, writers, and artists of our time. As a poet, writer, artist, and designer, himself, he has won numerous awards and fellowships, and judged several states' literary prizes. He has never set foot inside an MFA program in his life. Just the thought of it cramps him up viscerally. Being the co-developer of Heller Levinson's Hinge Theory, his continuing passion is the dynamic relationships among language, life experience, quantum theory, and mathematics.  Michael Annis has given many poetry performances nationally including three at West Point Academy where he read his work for US Cadets and visiting Russian military commando officers who had stormed into Afghanistan. [They warned us.] After the readings, he was decorated with medals by the Russians who compared him to Pushkin. Michael has been cited as "probably the most dangerous poet on the planet," for whatever danger can come of that; rather, he defines himself as a "rogue nation of one," preferring the intellectually expansive over the aggressively pugilistic, with which he is equally acquainted having coordinated public events featuring a sorcerer's brew of boxers, wrestlers, poets, tattoo artists, bikers, street hustlers, underground malcontents, misanthropes, and musicians.

Michael founded Howling Dog Press on money from the change jar in 1981; he was fervently pissed about/at the "powers-that-be" then.  With years added onto his work at Howling Dog, he is presently frenetically livid about this toxic/trauma we call "a free nation governed by a free people." Where are the real poets, he ponders, the ones with something to say and unafraid to say it. Graduating from an MFA program doesn't automatically equate to a "force for the empowerment of language and culture." In fact, it quite often unfolds the polar opposite. He says, "if you're thinking of leaving a footprint, leave it in language, leave it within the locus of the psyche, where all revolution ultimately manifests--but if you're planning on using an MFA program to show you how to go about it, time now to hang up your keyboard back in the closet. Language is alive, breathes its own dynamism, determines its own orgasm, and when you are lucky, her pleasure becomes yours--if you don't understand that, you're not in a marriage, you're chasing after a whore."  He often reflects on the notion that most perception is a slave of belief, and the language commonly generated in this paradigm is language chained to superstition and ignorance. He "believes" his mission is to destroy the chains that enforce this imprisonment.

To listen to Michael's most recent Radio presentation, click on the following link; after the website comes up, click on the control slide bar, the "timer", under the video screen to 22:20 [22 minutes, 20 seconds into the broadcast].  Michael's segment on the New American Dream radio broadcast ends at 42:00 minutes into the program.  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-new-american-dream-radio-show/2012/10/18/the-new-american-dream-radio-show

http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/MA7.html

Michael's work featured in Blackmail Press, New Zealand.

      http://issuu.com/thecartierstreetreview/docs/julycsr3  

      Michael's selection as the Featured Poet begins on page 23 of The Cartier Street Review.

Michael's “inhabitationem somnium [indwelling dream], inhabitationem lucem, inhabitation lux [indwelling light]” was published in the September issue of Ygdrasil [Sept. 11, 2012, Vol. XX, Issue 9, Number 233].

      http://www.synapse.net/kgerken/Y-1209.pdf