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Lucid Performance - Peter Rabbit

PETER RABBIT

Poet, author and performer “Peter Rabbit” was born in the oil region of Pennsylvania at the end of the Great Depression. He attended high school in Owensboro, Kentucky, and numerous colleges as a literature and writing major. Of those, Black Mountain College, where he was a student of Charles Olsen’s, was the most useful.

Writing and performing since his teens, Rabbit’s voice has been heard in American poetry and communitarian movements for over five decades. He has performed and lectured at universities, museums, bars, strip clubs, coffee shops and bookstores all over the U.S. and Canada. He has authored six books of poetry and nonfiction, including the underground classic, Drop City.

Rabbit was a co-founder of Drop City, the Southwest’s first commune and recipient of Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Award for poetically economic structural achievement. He also co-founded the Libre artist’s colony, the Taos Poetry Circus, SOMOS and the World Poetry Bout Association. Since the 60s he has lectured and published on alternate lifestyles, expanded states of consciousness, and appropriate technology and architecture. In 1972 he served as a technical advisor to Congress’ National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. He is an ordained bishop in the Universal Life Church.

 

 

Claiming he wants to be remembered as “the Don King of Poetry,” he has relentlessly promoted poets and their work since the mid-50s, when he lived and wrote in Taos alongside local poets of that time, Judson Crews, Richard Duerden and Max Finstein. With his wife and partner Annie MacNaughton, also a poet and performer, he founded the jazz/poetry ensemble The Luminous Animal in 1983 and could be seen in his role as Master of Ceremonies at World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bouts during the 80s and 90s. He and MacNaughton received the New Mexico Literary Association’s 1st annual Appreciation Award, as well as Verse Converse Festival’s Eternal Flame Award for Lifetime of Dedication to Poetry.

Past jobs include work in public relations, sales and advertising, as book review editor for the Ft. Worth Star Telegram, travel writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and host of a poetry show on local radio. He has also been a merchant seaman, commercial fisherman, head chef, food and beverage manager, tutor, substance abuse counselor, house parent, census enumerator, organic farmer, bartender, book store clerk, desk clerk, pig farmer, fund raiser, horticulturist and much more. In other words he has lived in the Sangre de Cristo range of the southern Rocky Mountains for a long time, and knows how to do whatever it takes to make a living. Currently retired in Northern New Mexico, Peter Rabbit writes every day and cares for an organic garden.

PETER RABBIT – OBITUARY

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peter Rabbit’s prose and poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, periodicals and small magazines, including Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop & the Poetry of a New Generation (SourcebooksMediaFusion, 2003), The Olympia Reader, Thus Spake the Corpse,
City Lights Journal, Art in America, Architectural Design, Shelter, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Foot, Wordworks, The Exquisite Corpse
and many more.

BOOKS

Taos Poetry Circus: The Nineties (essay) (Pennywhistle, 2001) prose

Ornithology (Minor Heron Press, 1984) poetry

Drop City (Olympia Press, 1971) prose

Recognitions (Grouper Press, 1965) poetry

Dance Sequences (Grouper Press, 1964) poetry, fine art print series

With a Bone in Her Teeth (chapbook, Iceman's Press, 1963) poetry

Mastodon (Jargon, 1955) poetry

peter@lucidperformance.com

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