Obituary
by Francis Till

...I know the
rhythm, two beats together, then not quite
too long a pause and it repeats, moving
the blood through me, just as your breath
on my eyelids begins and ends each day.
and when you come to me in the night
you are whole again, and all is as it
should be, as if you'd never left.

MCN - Dance of the Sun and the Moon

DIED: Phillip Michael McNeilley, poet, writer, artist, boxer, on July 16, 2000, at 11:20 p.m. in Las Cruces, New Mexico, of complications following a heart attack.

McNeilley was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 19, 1945, and is survived by two sons, Tom and Brooks, in Olympia, Washington; a daughter, Carol Ann Owens, whereabouts unknown; his mother and sister; Stephanie Brooks, mother to his sons; and Elaine Thomas, the loving friend and partner with whom he was living in Las Cruces.

A poet of international renown, McNeilley published extensively on the internet, and was among the very first to mix poetry with that medium. He was the founding editor of the Olympia Review, and the author of several print books of poetry and prose, most recently "Situational Reality", by Dream Horse Press (May 1999). An Honors graduate of the University of Colorado, McNeilley held many jobs in the course of a full life. As a teenager, he lost a leg in a motorcycle accident, cutting short a promising career as a boxer, and moved from there into literature. At the time of his death, he was co-editor of the well known, online e-Zine Zero City, with JJ Webb. In the past, McNeilley was Founding Director of the National Student News Service; worked as a reporter and correspondent in Washington, DC; and has published hundreds of poems and stories in magazines such as New York Quarterly, New Delta Review, Eclectica, Poet, Poetry Super Highway, Chicago Review, Oyster Boy Review, Cross-Connect, Sonoma Mandala, Hyphen, Minotaur, Slipstream, Cafe Review, Pink Cadillac, Chiron Review, Poetry Motel, Plazm, DAM, Lilliput Review, Boulliabaisse, Writers's Forum, Green Fuse, Rockford Review, Mississippi Review, God's Bar Unplugged, Impetus, Tight, xib, Penny Dreadful, Exquisite Corpse, Atom Mind, Wooden Head Review and elsewhere, including websites worldwide. His work has been translated into at least four languages and published in several countries, including England, Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Spain, and New Zealand.

McNeilley frequently used MCN as his signature, and major engine searches on the internet for his work under either MCN or McNeilley tend to return thousands of pages, making him one of the most prolific of recognized American poets.

Wakes and memorial services are being coordinated for McNeilley in Seattle, Olympia, Las Cruces, San Francisco, Kent, New York City, Portland, and Auckland (NZ), among other places, by the many hundreds of his dedicated fans and friends around the world. Most will occur on Saturday, July 22, 2000, and will be linked in virtual space through various live performance media.

Attempts are also underway to collect and collate all McNeilley's work - which amounts to several thousand poems and stories, as well as hundreds of drawings and prints - online. Numerous tribute sites have already sprung up, including one at http://208.56.181.166/ts10/MCN.html and this special issue of the Poetry Super Highway

Dennis Gaughan, Editor of Poetry Cafe, wrote of McNeiley's work that: Michael McNeilley writes poetry like a whisper in your ear at a party, saving you the bother of wasting time on a boring guest, so you can focus on what really matters.

That whisper in the ear will be deeply missed by all who knew him.

Eulogy

Michael McNeilley was my best friend. We went to university together and our lives have been a pile of spaghetti ever since. When he died, I began to discover how many others I shared that plate with ... hundreds of friends, bound together by love for him, as a poet and as a man.

Most of those relationships were forged online, as it turns out, although he was a gipsy in life and unforgettable when met in a bar or a bookstore. Online, though, his community was enormous, the largest of anyone I know. People read his work in places like this and wrote to him about it - he always wrote back. Over the years, this came to mean that his email
Morepork's* (http://www.owlpages.com/species/boobook/index.html) call sounded almost incessantly, and that many of those virtual meetings also developed into physical friendships as people came to visit, or he went off to readings around the country.

This week, all of those people are grieving, the ones he met and those he never had a chance to meet, alike.

Part of why so many of us are so deeply affected by his death is evident in his poetry. Michael was among the most prolific of poets, and all of it is personal. He had a way of turning his unique moments into words that elevated all of our own, that taught us new ways of seeing, and feeling. Even ordinary things like the smell of coffee or a lover glimpsed in a doorway at dawn were elevated in Michael's poems to an almost iconic status. He made the ordinary rare and imbued it with the full measure of its often overlooked but rightful grace and power.

And that is also the way he lived. When Michael paid attention to you, he really paid attention. He always heard you and he always knew what you meant, what you really meant. Don't misunderstand this - there was no Pollyanna in the man, none at all. There was a lot about life he didn't like, and a lot of people he would not suffer. He was at least as eloquent in the expression of contempt and derision as he was in celebration of beauty and genius, and that was part of his charm. You wanted him to like you, and if there was any reason for this to happen, he would find it. He found it in most of us, and he showed it to us, often when we needed it most.

Michael was fully immersed in life, and that immersion shows in all his work. Now we are all fully immersed in his death, and it shows in the way so many are reaching out to one another in the communities we share, online and off.

It is a terrible thing that Michael has died. His writing is only one of his legacies, however. The love so many feel for him is the true measure of who he was, and the largest gift he gave to us all. In a way, the fact that his heart brought his death should come as no surprise: he simply used it up, large as it was.

I'll miss you, always, my friend. Rest in peace, unconfined at last.

frank till
editor - inprogress
auckland, nz 2000