Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Flint Portraits: Larry O. Dean

Poet and musician Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, where he worked with Michael Moore as an arts editor and reporter at The Flint Voice. He's the author of seven books, including I Am Spam, a series of poems inspired by spam email.

Here's an excerpt from his poem entitled "Are You An Artist? Find out Free:"
"Do you want to know
that badly? Does it even matter?
You're either an artist, or you're not.
No middle ground. If
you don't already know
for sure, admit it,
there are suspicions - signs,
indications, warnings.

And you're worried."
After living in San Francisco, he now teaches poetry in the Chicago Public Schools, gives frequent readings, and is a singer-songwriter, working both solo as well as with several pop bands, including Post Office, The Me Decade, and currently, The Injured Parties.

For more information go to http://www.larryodean.com/



1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this, and for your very entertaining blog. I'll admit to many untold hours of contemplation about our hometown, whether I want to spend them that way, or not. It's times like these that make me wonder how truly boring it would be to have been born in Sarasota.

    Hope you're enjoying my old stomping grounds of SF as well -- great city, perhaps my favorite American city. That's why I'm not living there ... too much of a good thing, right?

    Spoken like a true Flintoid.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.