Below you'll find links to our collective favorite sites, literary and otherwise:

• Yes, we have "A Groundhog of Our Own" -- Staten Island Chuck, our mascot, who resides at the excellent Staten Island Zoo and "has been accurate in predicting the weather 16 out of 20 years - an 80% success rate!

• In addition to the "Sepoy World Tour" listings here at our own site, Sepoy's performances -- along with those of many other poets, and a host of poetry-related events in the New York City area -- can be found in the excellent calendar at Poetz.com. This site includes all sorts of other good stuff. You can also request their Poetz Monthly Update, which includes calls for work.

• Our own actual "nearby café" is The Cup (formerly the Muddy Cup Coffee House), located at 388 Van Duzer St., Staten Island, NY 10304; 718-818-8100, email contact@thecupsi.com. Located in the former home of Weinmann's Bakery in the township of Stapleton, on Staten Island's increasingly fashionable North Shore, the space was renovated and officially opened its doors on September 1, 2001. Sepoy's own Allan Coleman showed up at 7:30 a.m. with an aloe vera plant as a housewarming gift, in the process becoming the Cup's very first customer. We perform there from time to time.

• We've also performed at The Perking Latté Café, elsewhere on the Island: 840 Castleton Avenue, Staten Island, NY, 10310; 718-442-1534. Jeffrey Gaal, proprietor. Different crowd, different ambience, no less terrific a venue. J. J. runs the open-mic sessions here on Thursday nights.

• All of the Sepoy Rebellion's members are indebted in various ways to the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI), which has sponsored various events in which we've all participated and has supported three of us (so far) with individual artist's grants.

• Our friend Laura Brosé writes about the haunted houses of Staten Island and runs a wonderful site devoted to that subject.

• Henry David Thoreau resided for a while in 1843 in a cottage on Staten Island, where he corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson while "trying experiments upon trees." Edwin Markham ("The Man with the Hoe") lived and died here. Samuel Greenberg, a poet and cohort of Hart Crane's, wrote here during stays at Seaview Hospital's tuberculosis clinic in 1915 and 1916, shortly before his premature death. Edna St. Vincent Millay rode the Staten Island Ferry all night long -- "very tired, very merry" -- and wrote a fine poem about it.

• Alan Seeger ("I Have a Rendezvous with Death") spent a good chunk of his childhood on Staten Island. In 1954, shortly before they were brutally murdered, the Catholic Worker Dorothy Day -- herself a poet -- drove the homeless Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth to the Peter Maurin Farm on Staten Island, where they found refuge. In February 1999 we lost the great experimental poet Armand Schwerner, who lived here for the last decades of his long life.

• Some Staten Island musical poets:

  • Rae Kwon and Wu-Tang Clan

  • David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Buster Poindexter, The Harry Smiths

  • Vernon Reid (a recent arrival)

• Some Island book publishers and literary journals:

  • The unduplicable and ebullient Malachi McCormick, founder and publisher of the renowned Stone Street Press, lives in Stapleton. Malachi translates from the Gaelic, and writes some texts of his own. In his compact Stone Street studio, he generates beautiful and extraordinarily cheap ($10-30) handmade calligraphed limited-edition books that have made their way into major international collections. Be the first in your neighborhood to own one (or the entire set, at the bargain price of $500).

  • Thornfield Press
    21 Steele Ave.
    Staten Island, NY 10306
    PH: 718-351-2477
    F: 718-980-0965
    Fiction/Literature

  • New World Press
    376 Richmond Terrace - #2F
    Staten Island, NY 10301-1502
    Telephone: 718/818-0818; Fax: 718/818-0530
    or Alice Town, Bimini
    The Bahamas USA
    Telephone: 242/347-3201; Fax: 242/347-3544

  • Staten Island's Ten Penny Players publish the journals Waterways and Streams (the latter for high-school-age writers), run a poetry-in-the-schools project, and perform other excellent services on behalf of poetry here.

• Other Island literary resources:

  • The Island's own "Reading Lady," Mrs. L. Kump, at www.readinglady.com, provides helpful tips and supplies for teaching creative writing (including poetry) to grade-schoolers.

  • We don't just write here on the island; we also read. Often to ourselves, but sometimes to others. Staten Island OutLOUD creates public readings of everthing from Shakespeare to Islamic literature, and your participation is welcomed.

  • Bachagalou's Poetry Café constitutes an archive of heartfelt poems and prose poems, a late-twentieth-century repository of vernacular poetry. Hosted from 1996-1999 by the ever-mysterious Bachagalou of Staten Island, who now maintains it as an archive of 151 poets and 291 poems.

  • Who is the mysterious and prolific "Brbadpenny of Staten Island, NY, US"? We don't know, but you'll find a chunk of his output at The Web Poetry Corner.

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Sepoy Rebellion member Allan Douglass Coleman runs this entire website, The Nearby Café, which we recommend highly; see its main menu for the full list of offerings here. Elsewhere at this site, Allan offers up WordWork^™: Survival Strategies for the Professional Writer, a section devoted to issues concerning the life of the working professional writer, and Island Living: Tales of the Forgotten Borough, the online version of his monthly column about life on Staten Island for the Star Reporter, our local giveaway newspaper.

Allan also recommends:

• Expansive Poetry & Music Online, a curious and intelligent journal that represents what happens when the world of traditional discourse on poetics meets the internet.

• The Electronic Poetry Center "serves as a central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics produced at the University at Buffalo as well as elsewhere on the Internet. Our aim is simple: to make a wide range of resources centered on contemporary experimental and formally innovative poetries an immediate actuality."

• Initiated by the redoubtable Michael Neff, Web del Sol houses several dozen online literary 'zines -- not as a portal, but as a host and web designer for them. You can spend hours here and not exhaust its content.

• Web del Sol partners with the Words Work Network, which seeks to create a nationwide community of high-school--level writers. If you're an adult writer, spend some time with what these up-and-comers produce and be afraid . . . be very afraid. And also proud, and astonished.

• Wanna play? Try your hand at adding a limerick to OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, which holds as its noble goal "to write at least one limerick for each and every word in the English language." Who could argue with the urgency and utility of this mission?

• Need to get the poetic juices flowing, but don't want to go to the fridge to play around with your word magnets? Do it right on your computer. Mariner Software has now issued Desktop Poet, an excellent Mac-specific program (OSX) that puts a screen full of electronic "tiles" on your monitor for you to rearrange to your heart's content. You can save the results in a number of forms, including plain text. (Mariner has also taken over and will shortly release a program called MacJournal that enables journaling, blogging, and other creative activities.)