The Raving Poets Band
Thomas Trofimuk
Trofimuk loves the wrong note. Actually, he has grown to love the wrong note because he hits so goddamned many of them. He is a piano player bereft of technique, skill, ability or talent really. He loves sound. He's been known to play the piano with his elbows, feet, nose and head. He's passionate about pushing edges, about finding the right soundtrack for each poem. This autodidactic member of the Raving Poets band would describe his philosophy of piano playing simply by quoting Jackson Pollack: “I don't use the accident. I deny the accident.”
Contact: trofs@ravingpoets.com
Randall Edwards
Randy Edwards enjoys one of the most interesting lives of any person who has ever lived. From his birth at Blenheim Palace on November 30th, 1964, his life was one of action, controversy, setback and achievement. It is never dull.
There are a number of very good biographies about that life, the most thorough being the outstanding eight-volume official biography by Martin Gilbert, "Randall Edwards - I Saw, I Came, We Had a Baby", plus the (fifteen volumes and counting) Companion Volumes of letters and documents.
The GitBox Companion, named for the famous stickers Edwards attached to his memos, provides a quick outline of the essential dates of this remarkable life. Its sections are aligned with the volumes of the Official Biography. Articles published in Finest Hour are referenced throughout.
Like research into Randy's life, this blurb is constantly 'under construction.'
Contact: eds@ravingpoets.com
Gordon McRae
“Gord” to his friends, McRae was born of Anglo-Hungarian parentage in India, where his father worked for the Bangalore Forest Department. In his second year of classics studies, he was summarily ejected from Balliol College, Oxford, for breeding Nubian goats in his dormitory for the production of prophylactics. After extensive travel in the Balkans he joined The Times as a journalist in 1898, serving as a war correspondent in South Africa. He became chief correspondent for The Times during the Anglo-Boer War, and edited the seven volume, Bullets Over the Transvaal (1900-1909). In 1902 he was called to the bar, as a member of the Inner Temple, while continuing to work in journalism. During the Great War he served as an intelligence officer in Flanders, the Balkans, Gallipoli and Salonika, rising to the rank of temporary lieutenant-colonel. He survived the sinking of the Caledonian after she was torpedoed in the Mediterranean by improvising an inflatable from the Captain’s cat.
Wiry, relatively tall and sporting old-fashioned spectacles, McRae remained a fine athlete (he represented Harrow at cow-tipping and won a half blue for cross-country running at Oxford) and an enthusiastic mountaineer, marksman and sailor all his life. Witty, kindly and humane, he was a good conversationalist, but oddly a rather monotonous accordionist, unless indignant. A learned man, he was fond of telling stories and loved the classics, especially Aristophanes and Concordance to the History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. He had an incredible proficiency in languages, and was fluent in French, German, Italian, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian, Turkish and Sanskrit, as well as his mother's native Magyar.
In 1923, McRae died in what his comrades described as “a daring feat of arms”, involving the Dominions Secretary, a one pound Maxim-Nordenfeldt artillery shell and a plate of trotters.
Contact: gord@ravingpoets.com
Mike Gravel
Michael Timothy Gravel. Raving Poets Founding Father and frontman. Poet. Writer. Disregarder of convention. Sneering mocker of irrationality. Complete control freak. Hangs all his hangers the same way. Doesn't drive. Writes furiously. Codes furiously. Taker on of too much at once. Rocks and rolls. Swears too much. Doesn't answer the phone. Likes it when it rains. Has never eaten sushi and never will. Has no problem with ambiguity. Is usually singular in task. Wannabe frontman for a radical new rock band, "The Underground Gynaecologists". Has never read Ulysses and never will. Would like to evolve into a Bulldog. Thinks that we are all but small dots on a bigger dot. Wannabe photographer. Embracer of the sacred and the profane. Furious keeper of the beautiful.
Contact: gravel@ravingpoets.com
Mark Kozub
Mark Kozub is an Edmonton author, freelance writer and poet. He also dabbles in painting and teaching writing classes for young people through the Writers Guild of Alberta’s YouthWrite program. More importantly, he is the bassist with The Raving Poets Band.
Forget about the fact that Kozub is author of The Brown Family and now The Uptown Browns, co-author of A Calgary Album and a contributing author to the Edmonton bestseller Big Enough Dreams. Erase from your memory the fact that his poetry has been featured on CBC Radio, CBC TV, Book Television and The Bravo! Network, and his When I Was a Kid video poem appeared on the TV show ZeD and at various comedy festivals.
These are just details. Window dressing. Smoke and mirrors. Bells and whistles. The important thing is that Mark Kozub, the 42 year old man who grew up playing in a family band and dreaming of being a rock star whilst playing polkas and pure cheese from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, FEELS like a rock star each and every time he hits the stage with The Raving Poets Band.
Contact: kozubwrite@capitalstudios.ca
Photo: Randall Edwards