F.J. Bergmann

photo by Milton Friend

CONTACT

demiurge@fibitz.com

W5679 State Road 60
Poynette, WI 53955
608- 635-3966
www.fibitz.com

Rants on Poetic Policy and Practice: fibitz.livejournal.com/

POEMFACTOTUM.COM:
a poetry submission service.

F.J. Bergmann
Poynette, Wisconsin

BIO

Jeannie Bergmann is a web designer and artist. She maintains madpoetry.org, a local poetry website, as well as this site, wfop.org, and others. Her poems have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Fifth Review, Cannibal, Margie, the North American Review, nth postition, Real Poetik, Rosebud, Southern Poetry Review, Tattoo Highway, on asininepoetry.com (as Easter Cathay), and her Flash translation Lace was shown at the 2002 Electronic Literature Symposium. In 2003 she received the Mary Roberts Rinehart National Poetry Award and was a finalist for the James Hearst and Joy Bale Boone poetry prizes and the Violet Reed Haas book prize. In 2004 she won the Pauline Ellis Prose Poetry Prize and was the runner-up for the Stephen Dunn Award. In 2005, she received third places in The Writer magazine New Discovery contest and the Lumina Ultra-Short contest, and won Rosebud's 2006 Mary Shelley Imaginative Fiction contest. She co-edited the 2008 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar.

PUBLICATIONS

NEW! Constellation of the Dragonfly, Plan B Press, 2008, chapbook - $13.00
Aqua Regia, Parallel Press, 2007, chapbook - $10.00
Steaming A Head, 2005, chapbook of poems published in literary journals - $6.00
Sauce Robert, co-winner of 2003 Pavement Saw Press chapbook contest - $6.00
An Elaborate Arrangement of Paper Flowers in a Large Baroque Épergne, 2000, darkly comic fantasy story chapbook - $7.50
Life on Mars, 2000, epic sci-fi poem - $7.50
Psychic Massage Parlor, 1999, chapbook - $5.00
Most Days, 1998, chapbook - $3.00

Please add $1.00 postage per order.

BOOKINGS

2008

June
Sunday, June 8, 2 pm, reading, signing, & book release party for Constellation of the Dragonfly. RonCaerwien will also read. Avol's Bookstore, 315 West Gorham St., Madison, WI.

May
Featured reader at Tom Ferella's Nocturne multimedia presentation, 8 pm, Friday May 2, Winnebago Studios, Madison, WI.

April
Featured publishing workshop presenter, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets spring conference, Madison, WI.

2007

September
September 12-13: Reading and workshop at Elderhostel, Green Lake, WI.

Exhibitor/reader in artists' books exhibit, Madison, WI.

POEM

Suspended Animation

We left the atmosphere in a glittering swarm
of endless duplications of our shiny carapaces,
their clepsydral entrails studiously trickling,
counting down to a less unlikely tomorrow
as we fled the noisy light of our reddening sun.

A blue star in the constellation of the Dragonfly
was chosen again and again by the fanned array
of holy images, no matter how many times
magicians shuffled their whispering surfaces.
For days, everyone took turns at the telescopes

Beyond familiar stars the field worked for years,
connecting us with invisible filaments to our past.
When an unexpected demonstration of a doctrine
in the sacrament of physics turned our brothers
to a sudden flash, then cooling cinders drifting
into another universe, we became uncertain
of our destination, lost in an altered cosmology.

We entered the stacked, small cavities of oblivion
and sealed their doors against the pressure of grief.
Sleepwalking toward entropy, we float onward
in a silent void, wrapped in the blanket of time.
In the house of dreams we open the curtains
and wait for the pale light we know will come
from a strange sun rising over an alien world.

F.J. Bergmann

Winner of the 2002 BaltiCon science-fiction poetry contest and
published in Lite–Baltimore's Literary Newspaper May/June 2002

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