MADISON MORRISON: A biographical note

MM first visited India as a Fulbright Lecturer (1988-1989). From Madras (now Chennai), where he taught at the University, he traveled each week to give four dozen lectures across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. He made many friends. Some translated work into Bengali, Hindi, Assamese and Tamil; some have published his books. Others, such as Manjushree S. Kumar, R. Swaminathan and Arvind Thomas, subsequently wrote articles about his work (see MM: The Sentence Commuted). Morrison has returned to India many times, twice accepting invitations to lecture widely. On a third visit to Rajasthan Professor Kumar and the Audio-Visual Centre of Jodhpur University prepared a two-part program, titled “Epic of the Universe,” an interview with MM commissioned by Doordarshan, the national educational TV channel. Following his return to the USA from his Fulbright year, Morrison offered a course in The Foundations of Indic Culture and Civilization. Long before his first visit to India he had been a devotee of Indic culture. In 1972, for example, he introduced into a course of his concerned with universal poetic and philosophical texts the Upanishads, the Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita, selections from which eventually appeared as intertexts woven into Realization, a travelogue of America.

The full text of Happening

The full text of Bangalore Esightings

Books published in India by and about MM

Sterling Publishers Private, Ltd. of Delhi has published twelve of the 26 volumes in Sentence of the Gods, six in its 1989 SOLUNA: Collected Earlier Poems: Sleep, O, Light, U, Need, A; one in its 1997 Happening; and five in its 2001 SCENES FROM THE PLANET: In, All, Excelling, Or, Divine. Arnold of Delhi published the 1989 Selected Poems, a reprint of the English text in the 1985 bilingual English-Chinese Selected Poems published by Xing Guang of Taipei. Thamarai Selvi Pathippagam of Chennai published a 1999 bilingual edition of A Warfilm Is a Peacefilm, trans. R. Swaminathan. India Internet Ink of Bangalore published the 2003 Bangalore Esightings. St. Joseph’s Press of Bangalore published the 2005 Chaos and Cosmos in Morrison’s Sentence of the Gods by Frank W. Stevenson.

Work that incorporates Indic texts and archetypes

The 1996 Anterem of Verona’s Realization, whose composition also predated MM’s first trip to India, collected Poetry Around of Norman’s 1986 Realization, I and 1988 Realization, II and printed Part III for the first time.

Realization (Upanishads, Dhammapada and Gita)

Her
(Shakti)  
Exists
(Shiva)  
Regarding
(Vishnu)  
All
(Brahama)