Basic Information

• About me

  Sushi, literally translated, means “the marriage of vinegar to rice,” or sticky rice. If a chef is a master at sushi in this purest form, he might not get very far, for sushi means much more to most of us than sticky rice. If you offer someone some raw fish, they might look at you funny. If you put in IN the sticky rice you might then have their attention. Make the meat crab, wrap it up in a sheet of nori, stick in some cucumber, some avocado, even a little wassabe - then you have a California Roll and it tastes mighty good. People will eat your sticky rice and raw fish if you wrap it up with all the trimmings.In eighth grade I truly saw what poetry could be, do. I remember the feeling I got reading my first e. e. cummings piece, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct. No one else in my class understood the words all glued together. But I knew what cummings meant - how I could“break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.”It was at that very moment that I realized what poetry would do, could do beyond rhyming. I found out that words could be played with, manipulated, used for power. This excited me. And yet, I found it didn’t excite many others. Poetry just doesn’t excite that many people. Say the word “poetry” to people and most of them will envision a matronly, middle-aged woman in a frumpy, flowered dress and white gloves reading rhymed couplets about flowers to others dressed just like her and awaiting their turn, their flower. At the root of all my artistic excitement, all my efforts and endeavors at training in the other arts, is my poetry - and erasing that image. Meek little poetry, with its wallflower words, seldom read on plain eggshell page and pleading for illustration, I have dragged out of the closet, out from under the bed, and put on a lighted stage, plugged into an amp, displayed on an artistic canvas, trampled beneath dancers’ feet, or painted up in drag for its own good. As a multidisciplinary artist, my biggest client is my poetry. I do its PR. And it pays me with the attention of an audience. If I have to add music to make my poetry heard, I’ll do it. I’ve done it.If I have to see it staged with movement and chant, I’ll do. I have done it.If I have to memorize it, recite it in costume, with stage lights in my eyes, I will. And I have. If I have to be the screen for film that plays across my clothes to my words, I’ll be it. I want to.I just want people to get as excited about my poetry - poetry in general – as I am.There’s not much I won’t do with the other arts to make them feel it. I plan to. So, the recipe that works with my sticky rice poetry, and my raw digital art, is to wrap it all up in a nori-like sheet of direction, and throw in a couple of strips of theatre/design/dance/music/film and splash it with a generous helping of musical spice. It can be very delicious, but make no mistake - it’s the sticky rice that holds it all together. All I want to do for the next several years is continue to act as chef of my sushi art and serve it to an audience with a discerning palate. I want them to digest the experience without flowers. I want them to see it in tight black leather, dancing on a high wire, juggling words in the air while multi-colored fireworks explode behind them and music crescendos toward a climax of readers/viewers finding excitement in my words.