JOHN ROCK

On this site I am happy to be able to have all my major writings of the past few years available for anyone to access at any anytime.  Just click on the bar along the top of this site to read the full versions of my novels, plays, and books of poetry.

On this site I am happy to present three short plays: CRANE DANCE WITNESS, STAR BLANKET, and COYOTE SPLITS THE NIGHT.  All the plays have elements of myth and music and step across the imaginary barriers between what is human and what is animal and the communications that constantly take place often invisibly between the two.  Here is a brief introduction to each:

CRANE DANCE WITNESS: A woman and man with their two children in a small cabin in the northern forest face their young son’s serious illness through music, dance, talking about their dreams, and honoring the death of a crane.

STAR BLANKET: Katerina is the greatest seamstress among the people she’s been married to, except they don’t believe in the beauty of this young bride’s creativity, and she is closer to ravens and deer than what they believe is human.  In this drama full of song, dance, and storytelling, join a young skin-clothing artist as she faces the narrow views of creativity around her from the depths of winter.

COYOTE SPLITS THE NIGHT: Should two androgynous coyotes give humanity fire when hominids throughout history have already destroyed themselves countless of times?  And if they do, is it out of crafty benevolence or a serene self-effacing love of fermented meat?  And what is a raven and his sexy eye who is, yes, a person itself, doing running a Zen monastery?  See how one woman and her two children learn to own their creativity during a harrowing journey to the raven’s temple with only a guitar given to her by two enterprising quadrupeds in this musical comedy about humanity trying to make another go of it, possibly sometime around 3000 AD.

johnrockpoetry@gmail.com

On this site you can read the full versions of my futuristic novels REPORT THE EARTH and TO THE WELL OF EARTH, THE NIGHT FLYING COLLECTIVE and also my novella RETURNING TO THE WAVES.  Here is a brief description of each.

REPORT THE EARTH–the anatomies of the human population have ignited into brilliant spores turning the cities and all the human constructions on earth into gardens of lichens and moss where new and old forms of life thrive and create in a transformed eco-system.  This novel is told by four beings who are all telepathically connected: Mira, a being with four arms, one eye and an enormous tongue, Aira, a part reptile from the high-desert, Zeaesque, an Orophine who are the beings responsible for bringing humans to earth, and Altarberry, the last remaining human who is set on bringing the earth back into human control.  Read how these people learn to understand their own and other’s creativity in this lush new world.

TO THE WELL OF EARTH–what does it mean to be genetically engineered?  What does it mean to be someone else’s creation?  What does it mean to be a half-human/half-deer who walks out into the open air for the first time after the fall of civilization?  Follow the journey of a shape-shifting deer-human as he travels along the shore of the sea after walking out of an abandoned lab and struggles to understand his place upon a new earth by dreaming with story-telling horses and meeting a woman made out of night until he finally faces his past and future at the well of earth.

RETURNING TO THE WAVES–What are a bunch of goofy, loving people doing living on the beach after the rest of the human species have left the earth and transformed themselves into crazy unknown life-forms and even new planets?!  Are they just lazy or is it just too fun eating wild food, dancing in the moonlight with giant toads, devising bizarre culinary sculptures, and grappling with Anacropolis Copius who is, yes, one of those entrepreneurial canned food eating stock characters who are trying to, yes, re-enstate civilization?  In other words, how do you deal with your neighbors when they’re half-whale half-mushroom, or they’re just plain old conservative fuddy-duddies?  Find out how to make a mound of pesto sound like an ancient Buddhist mountain monastery in this comedy about joys of cooking and the end of the world.

THE NIGHT FLYING COLLECTIVE–To fly astrally or with real wings, as a human or a butterfly–to listen to winged beings–for your story to be like a plant in a vast eco-system reaching from the Great Lakes to the New Mexican high desert, reaching and speaking to each other from worlds above and beneath the earth–to fly between worlds, physically or with your own art and spirit–this is the world of the Night Flying Collective, five people attempting to allow the beauty of their own forms from deep within, whether owning your own creativity or the body you’ve created.  Come follow the reports of five people attempting to allow their true selves to shine: Techla, an ex-healer diagnosed with cancer; Ascenti, a teenage hermaphrodite in love with Jesus and Mary; Father Reminyi, a young struggling poet-Priest; and Montgomery, a young man who was born with webs between his toes and fingers and collects herbs near Lake Superior and meets a mysterious woman on the shore who calls herself L’Spirit.

I am happy to present all my collections of poems from the last few years in the poetry section of this site.  They are presented in the general order of their composition with BREATH ON THE MIDNIGHT PHONE at the top of the scroll being the most recent and THE MOON IS IN THE HOUSE being the oldest.  Most of the poems in these collections were written during my life on the south shore of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin with the exception of a few poems written in New Mexico.  In many ways, the poems are based in, or grow from, that amazing eco-system, not only of the wolves, deer, otters, wind in the white pines, and a cold deep sea-like lake, but the eco-system of living in a canvas wall tent with a wood stove for many years, an eco-system of listening, not only to a lot of classical music, but to the ravens and drumming woodpeckers, bears crunching apples, female deers singing at night, chainsaws, foxes stepping around my tent at night and hearing me turning off Olivier Messiaen to listen to them, gunshots, the friends who offered me their land to pitch my tent on, and the eco-system of being “alone”.  Living in a canvas wall tent not only made it easier to listen and tap into that constant conversation that was taking place between something deep within me and all the musics of the wind and everything else, but just the great ever-changing art of the shadows created by the sun and moon pouring through the pines and alders, through nuthatches and woodpeckers and chickadees pecking away at deer fat I would hang in the trees for them, onto the canvas so that just sitting at home it was so easy to realize you were inside the greatest work of art.  And it was so great to share that with friends when they they came over to visit.  And there were the sunsets over the lake, swimming in the cold clear water, walking and walking and walking, reading and reading and reading, working at farms, cutting wood with a bow-saw, tracks in the moonlight, super-cool librarians, and realizing that among all the animals and plants, all the winds which would blow you to the edge sometimes they roared for so long, all the dark winters with sometimes only a couple weeks of sunlight, all the jokes, all the tics and mosquitoes, all the cooking tea over an open fire and scribbling in notebooks, all the struggles to accept others and myself, and drinking only from artesian wells, with all the endless variety of the natural world, it’s hard to believe anybody could ever call you eccentric.

All the poems contain an audio version above each text.