About

Michael Karl Ritchie is a retired Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University. He has had three small press chapbook publications [Closing Down The Hearth, O-2 Press 1983; For Those In The Know, Caterpillar Press 1976; Night Blindness, La Huerta Press 1976] and work published in various small press magazines, including Gihon River Review, The Salt River Review, Nebula, The Mississippi Review, Margie, OR Panthology – Ocellus Reseau, The Red Earth Review, and The Arkansas Literary Forum.

SPACESHIP involves a collaboration with Blog-designer and artist Michelle McKinney, who often selects images and videos in reaction to poems written by Michael Karl (Ritchie), although, at times, Dr. Mike also picks images and You-Tube Videos to upload. Consequently, authorship is being undermined in this collaboration across gender, race, and age. McKinney refers to these pieces as “poetic jenga.”

 

Everything here is free, because it is too valuable to sell.

 

“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

 

 

Short documentary film on Michael Karl Ritchie’s Spaceship and other “disposable poems”: