Wess “Mongo” Jolley Poet, and Performance Poetry Promoter    The Raw Heart of Endless Fascination

Bio

Wess “Mongo” Jolley is a poet and poetry promoter, who spends his time moving between his home in rural Vermont, and his adopted city of Manhattan. Mongo's first excursion into the internet poetry world began in the 1995, when he created the website "ginzy.com" as a tribute to the great poet Allen Ginsberg. The site quickly grew to become the most respected and comprehensive source about Ginsberg on the internet. At the time of Ginsberg's death in 1997, the site was selected by major media sources as the primary resource for information on the poet, and Mongo became key in organizing readings to celebrate Ginsberg's life, all across the country. Ginzy.com was closed in 2001, as Google and other search engines made the clearinghouse nature of the site unnecessary. In 2006, Mongo founded the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel, which features the best spoken word artists in the field today. He remains the proprietor and host of the podcast, which, over the past three years has featured more than 200 poets in the over 500 episodes the show has released. As of early 2009, the channel boasted a total download count of over two million episodes distributed. The podcast can be found at http://performancepoetry.indiefeed.com. The show is also conistently listed as one of the top three poetry podcasts in the iTunes music store. In another life, Mongo is a Certified Records Manager and an information management professional with over 25 years experience in the field. For the past 15 years he has been the Records Manager at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he has also served as the Interim Manager of the Special Collections Library at the College. In these two roles, he has had indulged a keen interest and built extensive experience in both historical preservation issues, as well as information technology, data system design, and digital record keeping. Prior to his work at Dartmouth College, Mongo spent a half dozen years as a Crisis Counselor and Data Management Coordinator for the California Runaway Hotline in Sacramento, California. Mongo is currently combining his love for poetry with his expertise in information preservation, to promote a new project: The Performance Poetry Preservation Project (link and more information forthcoming). The project is designed to both nuture recording of poetry in performance, and will sponsor an institutionally supported repository for the preservation of these digital recordings. Mongo's poetry has appeared in Off The Coast, and in the Write Bloody Press book The Good Things About America. Audio versions of his poetry have been featured on the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel, and Cloudy Day Art. He has performed his work at many open mics across the country, including The Green Mill, The Bowery Poetry Club, The LouderArts Project, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. His first book, "Mice, Cat Litter, Bird Feathers" is forthcoming. In between all of these things, Mongo characterizes himself as a polyamorous queer faerie pagan poet bear, living happily on a ten acre mountain in very rural Vermont, along with his partner of a dozen years and an extensive chosen family that he cherises. He can be contacted at mongo.bearwolf@gmail.com.

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