Steven Hirsch - Air date: 04-08-08

Steven Hirsch is a poet, musician, electronic publishing guru, and editor/publisher of the literary magazine Heaven Bone. He studied writing and drama at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, where he was a student and apprentice of Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In recent years he has been riding his Harley all over the Northeast, studying buddhism, poetry and writing with Natalie Goldberg, and playing latin and african drums as a founding member of the drum circle "Spirithawk". He has been leading poetry workshops and giving poetry readings nationally for over 25 years. Steve is the author of Ramapo 500 Affirmations (Flower Thief, 1998) and he has had poems appear in Hunger, Napalm Health Spa Report, For Immediate Release, Pudding, Big Scream, Hazmat Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Etcetera.

Steve has read at the Core Gallery in New Paltz; the Catskill Mt. Foundation in Hunter, NY; Monkey Joe's Cafe in Kingston, NY; the Dactyl Foundation Gallery, NYC; The Bowery Poetry Club; A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC, and The Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY. among others. I loved watching some of the conversation you did with Ray Kurzweil. I have read some of his books and I was blown away. Being a technologist and a spiritual being is a high art and I respect his perspective on the future and the challenges we face. I have always been interested in nanotechnology and the potential for lifespan extension through nanomedicine and nuclear medicine. I believe that eventually death will be cured.

Along these lines I have always been very interested in UFO's in ancient biblical mythology and have read widely in this area. I am a closet Raelian and love their movement's philosophy of love and pleasure. We all come from the stars really.

On magazine publishing: I am on the front lines right now in the magazine industry as it fights for it's survival and it's not pretty. People are being layed off and companies are terminating employees with tenure of 20 and 30 years on the job. New media paradigms are killing traditional newspaper and magazine trades. Young people don't read them anymore because all the content they need is on demand 24/7 online for download. The art of the book needs to be held high and preserved before we are forced to read everything on computer screens and digital readers with wireless access to every word ever written. That's exciting and extremely threatening at the same time.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Poetry
• Chogyam
• Trungpa
• Rinpoche
• Allen
• Ginsberg
• Buddism
• Heaven
• Bone
• Electronic
• Publishing
• Kurzweil
• Nanotechnology
• MNNnyc