Poet

Christopher William Purdom

is a Philadelphia poet, heretic, and graphic artist with a peculiar grasp of English, an online reviewer of other poets' books, a life-long member and three-time Vice Moderator of Tabernacle United Church, the creator and maintainer of 226press.com and the Philadelphia Public Art web site philart.net, a designer of graphics for shirts and stickers, a graduate of Central High School and Temple University, and a long-retired second-degree black-belt in Shotokan Karate who previously served as Co-coordinator of the Interfaith Working Group, as a steering committee member of both the Fight the Right Network and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's National Religious Leadership Roundtable, and as an advisor to several other queer/religious/progressive organizations. As a poet, Chris does most of his own stunts, including writing, book layout, and cover design, plus video recording and editing. Poetic editorial advice is volunteered by humans who wish to remain anonymous. Chris's poetry includes Narcoleptic Heretic (a critically ignored formal confessional language flarf performance art epic published in ten sequentially numbered, individually titled, 24-poem volumes from 2005 to 2014); the very long conceptual nonsense work BEYOND EVERY GENOME; three short sequels to the epic: RESIST, Mississauga and BATAGAIKA; two more conceptual nonsense works: pandemicfatuation and TWENTY; and the long poem Will, which is about the theology and practice of predestination. The poetry is available in free PDFs on this site, and as video readings. The video section also includes program notes for the epic, a silent piece, "Without Rabbits" and one otherwise unpublished poem, "In With CDC".