New poems by Paul Edwin Zimmer discovered

 One of the stranger outcomes of doing research for the anthology is that you find relevant poetry in the craziest places.

For instance, I now know more about Asatru -- a modern religion of Odin worship -- then I ever thought possible. This is thanks to the website Odin's Gift run by a modern pagan woman and poet from Germany, Michaela Macha. The website's a massive collection of pagan-related works and verse that I just stumbled upon a few weeks ago -- I forget how specifically. Well, I emailed Michaela to ask if her site had any specifically alliterative poetry, and she directed me to the following page: Alliterative Poetry in Old Norse verse meters.

Looking through it, I quickly discovered something astounding: a link (broken) to a poem called "Invocation" by Paul Edwin Zimmer.

Now, I've found "lost" poetry by Paul before ... namely, the stuff he wrote as "Master Edwin Bersark" for the Society for Creative Anachronism. And I previously knew that he was a modern pagan, although I hadn't really thought much about it before. But anyway, I was greatly curious about this poem .... but its link was broken.** So I again asked Michaela (and how nice is she, really?), and she sent me a copy of the poem, which came from a book on modern paganism by Diana L. Paxson.

I subsequently ILL'd several of Paxson's books, and soon realized that Paul had privately published a small booklet of pagan poetry at Greyhaven in 1979, The Wine of Kvasir. About 5 or 6 of these poems are reprinted in Paxson's books, none of them are listed in ISFDB, and all of them are written in the alliterative meter.

I've emailed Tracy Blackstone, Paul's agent (and ex-wife), to see if she had any information on The Wine of Kvasir, but so far no luck. There's an Amazon listing for the the book, but no copies available anywhere.

Still, this is pretty cool. 


**I vaguely remember running across this website and this poem a few years ago, when I first started writing on Paul's poetry, but stopping my inquiry at the broken link. Trust you me, I'm much more confident now about cold-emailing total strangers. Before, such things wouldn't even have occurred to me.

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