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[Machine Gun]

   You can order the JoDaviess County Concrete collection of poems written between 1966 and 1972 in JoDaviess County, Illinois; Granville, Ohio; Montréal, Québec; Edmonton, Alberta; and Exploits Island, Newfoundland. That was quite a journey when I was a young draft dodger. It got even more exciting later when I finally got to Paris, but that is another story.
  The book is 77 pages long, including my letter to my draft board. If you like the '60's you should read JoDaviess County Concrete
  Please write to the address below for order details:

Tom Nagel
157 rue de Charenton
75012 Paris
France

  JoDaviess County is in northwest Illinois on the Mississippi River next to Wisconsin and Iowa. It is the home of seven Civil War Generals, including Ulysses Simpson Grant. My favorite, Elihu Washburne, was the local congressman during the civil war and later ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. After the war the river silted up and the riverboats no longer stopped there. When I was growing up the retired riverboat captains' mansions, with their ballrooms on the third floor, were all rotting away and forgotten.
  I discovered concrete poetry at Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1966 in an English Creative Writing Course given by Tony Stoneburner. There was a spacy concrete poet in Cleveland who churned out book after book on a mimeograph machine, d.a. levy, and some of these masterpieces somehow stumbled into my library. I started writing my own and they became JoDaviess County Concrete.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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