Author of EMOTION AND EMBODIMENT: FRAGILE ONTOLOGY (1993, Peter Lang), THE TRICKSTER, MAGICIAN AND GRIEVING MAN: RETURNING MEN TO EARTH (1994, Inner Traditions), & EARTHBODIES (2002, SUNY) and HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND MACHINES: BLURRING BOUNDARIES (SUNY, fall, 2008). He has also published 75 poems in 39 literary journals, including North American Review, Spoon River Review, Rosebud, Many Mountains Moving, Sou'wester and others. Glen is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities and former Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Masters Program, Penn State Harrisburg. He was awarded THE PENN STATE HARRISBURG FACULTY RESEARCH AWARD FOR 2009. His newest book, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE DEPTH OF THE FACE OF THE WORLD will be finished in the Winter, 2013. His first book of Poetry, THE RIVER BENDS IN TIME, will be published by Anaphora Literary Press in May, 2012
The River Bends in Time, a 110 page collection of poems,has just been published by Anaphora Literary Press. The poems follows the flow of time and the river as it unwinds in a small town in Pennsylvania along the banks of the Susquehanna. The narrator experiences those quiet moments of joy when ducks come from the sky to skim the water’s edge or in the height of a Nor’easter as he walks through the forest filling with snow, but also the sadness of a neighbor’s dying or love breaking apart. The river flows, always bending and changing, like discovering the love of a mate that one joins with, becoming partners who run together under flying snow geese or dig a pond behind a two hundred year old house. Yet, the postmodern world seems lost without a past. A bout with colon cancer brings a renewed sense of the preciousness of each day and how the culture is wrong in its headlong race towards the future. The book ends with moments that resonate with the past in a state of continual affirming discovery. Soon available at Anaphora website or Amazon.com (by mid-March, 2012)
Response to THE RIVER BENDS IN TIME:
“For decades, Glen Mazis has been a reliable literary witness, perfecting these remarkable poems as evidence of his exquisite and graceful observations. A poem has to be capable of anything, "a religion without hope," said Cocteau, and the beautiful accidents of poetry occur from searching in the dark, always alone, where we are not perceived but received, so that the final musical structures and equations are invisible and seamless, soaking down into the darkness of its reader, unimpeded by analysis. Even now, these remarkable poems are nosing around in the ether, looking for the readers they were meant to inhabit. Poetry is the last passable wilderness for language, because just as we poets are an immense minority, we are also invisible to the giants of industry, who believe the mountain is the only master, and that all action flows around it. Mazis shows us the invisible markers of our daily pilgrimage, in a language wise and sonorous at once. He has spent the time to become a valued ‘priest of the invisible,’ and is still at his post, his clarion call is still resounding and it is ageless. No matter that all the cultural markers continue to undergo their tremendous seismic shifts, the poetry of The River Bends In Time will continue to widen in influence, continue to flow and be fiercely alive. This poetry is essential and will continue to come to the party, however unexpected, sometimes in disguise.”
---Keith Flynn [founding and managing editor of THE ASHEVILLE POETRY REVIEW, author of The Golden Ratio, The Lost Sea, The Book of Monsters and other books of poetry and criticism]
"In Frost-like fashion, Mazis portrays the contemporary philosopher-poet questing for insight and connection that staves off our common loneliness, pain and fear, while ever ready to clasp life’s simplicity and joy."
—Ann Frank Wake, Editor of River Oak Review, Elmhurst College
another response:
"Glen Mazis's poems are deeply attentive to the world and to its humans. His poems are filled with 'electrical veins', though not the same kind that appear in his moving elegy for a friend and neighbor." -- Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux’s books of poetry include God Particles: Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light (1980); Sunday (1979); Madrigal on the Way Home (1977); The Glassblower's Breath (1976); Memory's Handgrenade (1972); and The Land Sighted (1970).
a sample poem from the book:
On this Path of Transubstantiation
Lope, lope, I move through the skies
with each runner's footfall
unable to translate
for my sedentary friends
how earth becomes sky,
but flying isn't about altitude
the moment when warm muscles
melt the frost accumulated over night
on the mind's windshield,
so kids skipping down the street,
dogs looking for the right place to pee,
the truck lumbering through the gears
like a rhinoceros lifting out of the mud
can be seen for themselves
gathering into themselves
intricate, irreplaceable dance steps
in an incantatory daily ritual
that makes the divinities of the sky
the pedestrians of the earth
then having turned it all up and back
these steps have broken
the earth's gravity.
Philosophical Books: Newest:
Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries (SUNY, September, 2008). This book probes the blurring of boundaries among humans, animals and machines. It explores how this blurring has become intensified in ways both destructive for humans, animals and the environment, and also offering fruitful possibilities for these three realms to work together. The book is unique in looking at the comparison of all three realms together, instead of just comparing two of them, as most studies do. Also, the book is unusual in being so interdisciplinary, drawing upon philosophy, artificial intelligence studies, physics, animal research, writings about autism, literature, aesthetics, technology research, poetry, attachment theory, and psychology. The approach is largely phenomenological, concerned with fidelity to most people’s experience. Other phenomenological approaches to the questions asked, such as Heidegger’s work on animals, are examined. Throughout, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment is used to articulate the relationships among humans, animals and machines in new ways. The intention of this work is to go beyond the shrill warnings about the dangers of ecological damage or the pitfalls of technical enhancement of humans or of the increasing power of various technologies, to reconsider how given that each realm does overlap with the other two, there must be ways that humans, animals and machines can work together for mutual thriving. The book dares to give new definitions of humans, animals and machines given their historical development and reconsiderations of their relationships. The book is not content to deal with philosophical concepts or abstractions, but works with contemporary examples of animal behavior, technological advances, robot experiments, or the life-transforming experience of someone with a cochlear implant. Readers will find a concrete path into these thickets of questions facing postmodern culture and be challenged by its conclusion that we need a new ethical response to animals and machines as “persons.” The book ends with a call for an ecospirituality.
Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (Peter Lang, 1994) is a phenomenological exploration of the differing ways we know the world through the emotions, and how both the world and we as knowers are different by knowing the world within the emotional life. It draws upon a lot of literary examples, as well as works of philosophy and psychology. It extends the work of Merleau-Ponty on the embodied, percetual basis of emotional apprehension and expression. This book has been cited by ALTER: The Review of Phenomenology in France in their 1999 issue devoted to the phenomenology of the emotions as one of the four most landmark works on the phenomenology of the emotions.
Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses(SUNY, 2002) details a sense of embodiment that entails different notions of time, perception, and the relationships to the natural world, to animals, to cyberspace, and to space itself. It is also a critique of American culture and its disconnectedness, and examines the fascination with vampires, ghouls, aesthetes, and the Internet. It is a book intended to help us move from a sea of sentimentality and violence towards an existence of commitment and the graceful affirmation of the natural world, other people, differing cultures, and each person's unique rootedness in a history and place.
More Popular Book:
The Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man: Reconnecting Men with Earth is a critique of the Men's Movement mentality of Robert Bly and draws parallels between Bly's metaphors and mindset and Bush's in conducting the Gulf War. It critique's "tank embodiment," "high altitude living," "missile sexuality" and language use as "the briefing." The second half of the book suggests ways in which the traditional male gender roles could benefit from contact with ways of other cultures, like the Native American traditions of trickster, with taking differing stances towards emotions and especially grieving of losses, finding creative ways of dealing with death, old Hindu myths of being "food" for all and hence learning to cook for others, relations with the slower time of nature ... etc. (Inner Traditions, 1994)
"Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Nature: Passage, the Oneiric and Interanimality" (interpretation of his lectures on nature, published as La Nature), appeared in CHIASMI INTERNATIONAL, vol #2.
"Our Embodied Friendships with Dogs" (in WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT YOUR DOG, ed. by Steven Hales, Open Court, 2008),
"The Archetypal Alchemy of Technology: Escaping and Returning to Materiality's Depth" in Spring: Journal of Archetype and Culture (Jungian Studies), vol. 80 (Winter 2009), pp. 1-35"
The World of Wolves: Lessons about the Sacredness of the Surround, Belonging,The Silent Dialogue of Interdependence and Death, and Speciocide" in Environmental Philosophy, vol v., issue 2, Fall 2008, pp. 69-92
"Cyborg Life: The In-between of Humans and Machines" in PhaenEx, Journal for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, vol. iii, no. 2, Fall, 2008, pp. 14-36.
UPCOMING POETRY READING:
reading from THE RIVER BENDS IN TIME at Penn State Harrisburg, 6-7:15PM,
Gallery Lounge, Olmsted Building, Middletown, PA
Book forthcoming: Merleau-Ponty and the Depth of the Face of the World
