A composite portrait of the late artist, philosopher, poet, and scientist by colleagues, contemporaries, and friends.
CONTENTS +
Bern Porter: A Found Essay
By Mark Melnicove
“Bern’s extraordinary gift is his way of just sort of mysteriously noticing things and calling our attention, quietly, to them. This explains the peculiar effectiveness of his designs, his constructions and his found poems. He presents us with something and tells us it is a poem. Noticing: That is Bern’s art.”–Dick Higgins
Mark Melnicove is a writer, educator, editor, literary agent, and publishing consultant based in Dresden, ME. He is the co-author (with Margy Burns Knight and Anne Sibley O’Brien) of Africa Is Not a Country (Millbrook Press, 2000) and received the PEN New England Discovery Award in 2000. From 2002–2021, he was an English and Creative Writing teacher at Falmouth High School in Maine. Melnicove collaborated with Bern Porter from the 1980s until Porter’s death in 2004 and is the executor of Porter’s estate.