On Thanksgiving, poet Dave Church passed away.

The reason I know Dave Church is that when I first started sending poems out to small magazines, about ten years ago, he was in every journal. We wrote letters back and forth and his letters were always on thin sheets of paper and written in this crazy longhand. Some were typed on a typewriter. Tough, compassionate, and funny, I always liked corresponding with Dave Church.

Prolific in publishing, Dave Church was also this kind of larger than life character that I always heard about through other writers.

From PoetryMagazine.org.uk: in an articled title “Dave Church: a well kept American Secret:”

“From the tomato plantations of Florida, where he spent time on a ‘chain gang’ for being drunk and disorderly, the eighteen year old youth had set out on a Beat odyssey that was to occupy much of his life from then on in. He has worked as a roofer, bouncer, street barker (for Big Al’s, a strip joint seen behind the opening credits on the old ‘Streets of San Francisco’ TV series), and even cut the lawn for a doctor who paid him in drugs.”

Dave Church was old school indie lit, publishing hundreds of poems in small venues and numerous chapbooks and broadsides.

Sorry to be so dark on a Monday morning, but I thought this was important.