Author: mbheyman

Michael Heyman is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature, and a Professor of Literature at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on Children’s Literature and music, Poetry, Performance Poetry, Nonsense Literature, and Arthropodiatry. His articles have appeared in the ChLA Quarterly, The Horn Book Magazine, Words Without Borders, and The Lion and the Unicorn, where he was also a four-time judge for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin 2007). His poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (Scholastic 2007), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Scholastic 2012), the latter of which he also edited. More recently, he was a guest editor for the nonsense literature issue of IBBY’s Bookbird (2016). He plays the saxophone, tablas, flute, and the diddlemaphone.
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Åland and my Big Head

My big head rears its ugly… um… will here’s an interview in one of the big Åland newspapers. Hope your Swedish is up to snuff(kin)!

Click below for the two pages:

Page one of article.

Page two of article.

And the special online bonus: a video of an abbreviated “Ursonate” by Kurt Schwitters.

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Nonsense Residency, Eckerö Post and Customs House, Åland Islands

The Groke, observing the Eckerö Post and Customs House

Perhaps it was being raised on the Swedish chef’s jaunty genius, or perhaps it is the perspicuous peaks and valleys of intonative incline; or perhaps it is the historical hiccups that created Swedish-speaking Finns (better than Fiendish-speaking Swinns, my Farfar used to say, and he knew a few swarthy Swinns in his day); or it could be the Lunatic Lund spirit, found seven years ago right under the nose of the Nose Museum and the highly- regarded PhD on Nosery; but it does seem that nonsense, slow like honey wrapped in a five pound note, comes with the slow spring, in the mossy forests’ underfoot crunch or the absurdly large bunnies, tempting one down a rabbit hole, of this island of Eckerö, in the Åland Islands, beTwixt and between like an early adolescent on beHalloween.

Whatever currents that brought me here, I find myself in an Artist Residency at the Eckerö Post and Customs House, built in 1828 to prongify the Swedes and the rest of the world, a kind of Pre-Putin shirtless horseback riding through the cutting Baltic wind to put a puffed up front on a crumbled empire.

My mission: to create, in this hybrid archipelago, some strange hybrid of sound poetry and literary nonsense, something that some adults will find terribly difficult, and something some children will find terribly funny and something most will just find terrible. It will happen by way of something like this—and so consider yourself fairly warned.

I would get to work if I could just find a tabell that wasn’t bustidd.