About the Author

Lance Strate has been labeled as an educator, public speaker, writer, and poet, as well as some other, less benign designations. His poetry has been published in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, KronoScope, Explorations in Media Ecology, Anekaant, the General Semantics Bulletin, and Poetica Magazine, as well as several anthologies. His first poetry collection, Thunder at Darwin Station, was published by NeoPoesis Press in 2015, as was the anthology of creative work he co-edited with Adeena Karasick, The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan. His other books include Echoes and Reflections (2006), On the Binding Biases of Time (2011), Amazing Ourselves to Death (2014), and Media Ecology (2017). He also has a number of other co-edited volumes to his credit, among them Communication and Cyberspace (1996, 2003), The Legacy of McLuhan (2005), Korzybski And... (2012), and Taking Up McLuhan's Cause (2017). Dr. Strate earned his PhD with Neil Postman at New York University, and holds the title of Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City, as well as serving as a Trustee and former Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, President of the New York Society for General Semantics, a founder and board member of the Media Ecology Association, and a past President of the New York State Communication Association. Lance Strate received the New York State Communication Association's 2019 Neil Postman Mentor Award and their 1998 John F. Wilson Fellow Award (in recognition for exceptional scholarship, leadership, and dedication to the field of communication), the Eastern Communication Association's 2019 Distinguished Research Fellow Award, the Media Ecology Association's 2018 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book (for Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition) and their 2013 Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship. He delivered the 2018 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, and Denver Mayor Wellington E. Webb proclaimed that February 15, 2002 be known as Dr. Lance Strate Day in the City and County of Denver in honor of the keynote address he gave for the Rocky Mountain Communication Association. Lance has written comedy and humor, op-eds, lay sermons and prayers, an episode of the nationally syndicated children's animated television program Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, several multimedia presentations, many blog posts, and close to 200 essays. Translations of his writing have appeared in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Quenya.

Reviews

A bold and radiant journey into a jigsaw universe, Strate's poems reveal a redemptive self-awareness, a playful exuberance with the twists and turns of the whirling worlds of language and imagery, feeling and experience. T.C McLuhan, author and filmmaker Significant, casually formal, sly, engaging, passionately inexact, curious, playful, and utterly readable: the magic in Lance Strate's poems is in the profound and humble poetic intelligence that guides them. With it he creates a charged silence in the gaps between the words where their consensual meanings, along with the reader, pass through the universe of things thus far unsaid-the ever-present substance of what life feels like-before they reach the next word on the other side. Chuck Wachtel, poet, novelist, Pen/Ernest Hemingway Citation recipient Lance Strate has created a joyous maelstrom of cultural symbolism, timeless mystery, and linguistic dance. His style is both childlike and profound... as if Mother Goose had a son with Lewis Carroll raised by Camille Paglia and Kurt Vonnegut and given a mission to expand the boundaries of perspective and wonder. Treat yourself to insightful, poetic lunacy of the highest order.Stephen Roxborough, internationally acclaimed poet, co-founder of Burning Word poetry festival, and Head Poet for Madrona Center on Guernes Island Lance Strate's wordplay unleashes a tumbling and a turning of phonemes and phrases skipping consciousness like stones on a lake. This is a delightful collection resonant with sound and rhythmic flourishes. The poet's jesters that "...the meaning of meaning is meaning... a leaning" then immediately goes about his craft pitting story against a light-hearted dance with language. Lillian Allen, internationally acclaimed poet and Professor of Creative Writing, Ontario College of Art and Design University Lance Strate's clever, pithy, and logocentric poetry at once celebrates language and manifests itself as performance art. Poems with titles such as "essays," "prose," and "these words"--unlike the verbiage described in "up in smoke" becoming "disappeared for all time"--will endure. Why? Because, for example, the science fiction poem "ode on a geekian urn" poses the definitive question of our brave new science fiction virus-sodden world: "thank goodness the Force was with us then is it with us now?" The answer: emphatically yes. We have Strate's luminous poetic illocutionary force to accompany us and light our way during dark times. Marleen Barr, novelist, literary critic, and Pilgrim Award recipient