Next >> Sean Arthur Joyce (aka Art Joyce)   Born in 1959 in the pristine mountains of British Columbia’s Kootenay region of Canada, Joyce began writing and publishing in high school. During the 1980s and ’90s, he began publishing poetry and working as a freelance journalist for regional BC newspapers. His popular weekly heritage column, Heritage Beat, ran for five years in the Nelson Daily News of Nelson, BC. Based on this research, two books of history were published, A Perfect Childhood, on the classic homes and personalities of frontier Nelson; and Hanging Fire & Heavy Horses, on the city’s historic streetcars and buses.    Joyce has been an organizer of poetry tours and cafés since the ’80s and a frequent performer on the Kootenay scene. His poems and essays on poetics have been published in various Canadian literary magazines, including Canadian Author, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Whetstone, The New Orphic Review, and Horsefly. In 2000 he produced and directed a poetry video, The Muse: chameleon fire, with funding from BRAVO TV. Under his limited editions imprint, Chameleon Fire Editions, Joyce has published numerous collections of his own and other poets, including Chad Norman, Catherine Owen and Margaret Hornby. He has also worked as an editor with Horsefly magazine, a literary annual published through the Nelson Fine Arts Centre. Joyce's new collection of poetry, The Charlatans of Paradise, published by New Orphic Publishers of Nelson, BC, is available by direct order via e-mail for $14 plus $6 shipping.   Contact: chameleonfire@hotmail.com   Selected Poem: Mothlight   The moth. It's everywhere in my house this summer. Every kind of moth imaginable– little ones that look like curtain lace, black ones, grey ones, even, once– a red one turning itself admiringly on my bathroom mirror. This winged being whose one thought is to find the light and then die.   'Mission accomplished, it can say to its Higher Power, 'I have become the light I searched for all these many lives.' Souls ride the sun-dusted light of afternoon. Future avatars descend on a pearl staircase.   Maybe they keep appearing to lead me somewhere–some portal, some cloud-wrought gateway I'm too blind to see. No wonder. I'm a walking nightmare starved for the light of dawn. Pale wings cover my face when I dream. Sleep the one realm where pain never walks.   When I wake, peel the scales from my eyes. Bend this body, these wings–stretch me thin and thinner–crack me, break me, crush me for the final plunge                                into ecstatic light and let me be done. Back to the Poets Directory Home