“Still Breathing”, a poem written by the Australasian poet Stephen Oliver, commemorates Derick Burleson, the Alaskan poet who died on December 29, 2016. Oliver reads the poem in this video presentation. “Still Breathing” was first read at Derick’s memorial by his spouse, Nicole Sprague, on April 1, 2017 in Fairbanks, Alaska.
You can also read Derick Burleson’s obituary in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner here.
Stephen Oliver | Australasian poet / voice artist and author of 18 volumes of poetry. Lived in Australia for 20 years. Now NZ. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel in the late 70s. Free-lanced as production voice, narrator, newsreader, radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. He has published widely in international literary journals and anthologies. Regular contributor of creative non-fiction and poems to Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Oliver’s poem cycle Deadly Pollen, Word Riot Press, USA (2003) translated into Spanish (Polen Mortal) by the Chilean poet, Sergio Badilla Castillo and first published in Nagari (Vol 7 2015). Represented in: Writing To The Wire Anthology, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, University of Western Australia Publishing 2016; Manifesto: A Political Anthology, edited by Emma Neale and Philip Temple, Otago University Press, 2017. Newly released: GONE: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2016.