"Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory."
--Milan Kundera
The famed editor of the notorious ART:MAG, Peter Magliocco, is nothing if not a dark, creepy symbolist. His unnerving poems are an exploration in the desperate and bloody. Whether writing on Anne Frank or the violence in Israel, he always manages to make his symbols immediately relevant, bringing home the disturbing feelings on which he focuses.
Peter says, "There's always a proverbial beginning: I was born on Oct. 26, 1948 in Glendale, Calif., and was raised in the San Fernando Valley for the first 19 years of my Italian-American upbringing, a spoiled only child of middle-class parents (Mom worked for Kodak in Hollywood where for one hellish summer I sorted film canisters; Dad went from blue collar pottery to selling insurance until an early disability stemming from his World War II experiences); went into the Army at 19 in 1967 (& later wrote a self-published novel about my misadventures as a Military Policeman at the '68 Washington riots, Among a Godly Few, which went immediately out of print) and served in Germany, where I developed an interest in the painterly Old Masters; returned to Southern California to eventually get a B.A. in Fine Art in '75 -- an experience more traumatic than the Viet Nam war era itself, since I was deemed "problematic" by the art professors & hardline feminists of the time -- but was unable to make an academic living teaching and eventually gravitated with a thud into the security field, where I've been ever since, except for stints at various jobs such as in print shops, telemarketing, store sales & stock, warehouses, etc., after moving to Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1985 to work in airport security at McCarran International for several years, never marrying, working primarily then to return to Europe for expatriate jaunts chiefly visiting as many art museums & galleries as possible, since I was a freelance artist for the small presses by then, as well as the "crypto-editor" of Limited Editions Press operating out of an old office I literally lived in, located in the industrial section of town, enabling me to cheaply put out my small press publications like ART:MAG, the vehicle for my own artistic & poetic & fictional expressions along with a great many other folks too numerous to name or accurately count, yet I've had little to really do with the local Vegas "culture" scene over the years which has falteringly attempted to gain real credibility in a city where art is a neon lightshow goggled at by tourists, an atmosphere I somehow found conducive to my own creative ends, since snobbery didn't exist & nobody gave a damn what you did in Sin City as long as it was "sinful" (or unpardonable, which a great deal of small press stuff is); have, by middle-age, lived a loner's lifestyle, with a Pinto bearing primer spots being my chief chariot for years, earning wages which qualify me as one of the legally poor in an affluent country, somewhere down the line got lost & invented my poetic person, "The Mag Man," to give the schizophrenic demons their proper due and outlet; would really like to finish my long, neo-futuristic novel, NU-EVERMORE, and see if the years laboring over a word processor in a town devoted to megabucks will finally pay off ... but am expecting nothing but the ol' same-o; maybe my bio in the Marquis' Who's Who in America 2000 (and 2001-2002) says more about me in fewer words than this, listing the bare biblio-facts of chapbooks published, surface things done, for in all honesty I'm still wondering who the heck 'Peter Magliocco' is & what he did, OK?" Recent chapbooks of Peter's include LIFE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH (JVC Books, 2001), ICED AMARANTH (Limited Editions Press, 2001), ROCKS AND GRAVEL (Pariah Press, 2001, includes other writers), VETERAN'S DAY AT MIDNIGHT (MuscleHead Publishing, 2000), THE MOVIE PRESIDENT (Pariah Press, 1999), and THE ANOMALIES: Hardly Working in Sin City (Scrooge's Ledger, 1998). His new novel, NU-EVERMORE, is available in the Unlikely Stories Bookstore. Drop him a line at magman@iopener.net.
Peter's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2003:
scrambled-X
Frequent Flyer Blues
inamorata of the desert
2002:
Hot Water Muzak
over the limit
sacrifice
into the tracks
directions for a hijacked videoplay
2001:
Of a Vision in the Anne Frank House
beneath smoke & sculpture
prayers, or