In my poetry I aspire to tell stories and sing songs—leaning into the narrative and musicality or lyric of language as much as possible. My goal is joy—in the act of writing and the response to reading or listening.

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When I was in high school the most “contemporary” poet we read in English class was Robert Frost. And he’d been dead for 20 years! It wasn’t until college that I discovered there were actual poets out there—alive, well, and writing serious poems—and not just hobbyists and spinster aunts dabbling in limericks and the light verse I’d read in the local paper. Of course, I read Howl and On The Road in high school, but the Beat style, as much as it excited me, was two decades old.

My first encounter with a real live poet took place my freshman year of college when a dorm mate dragged me to a reading by Robert Bly—which turned out to be more of a captivating performance than a reading. The poems he read then besides his own, of Kabir, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Tomas Transformer, Mirabai, Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and others introduced me not just to poetry but to the magic of language—its potential to engage, inspire, entertain and enchant. From then on I was smitten, or bitten, and never looked back. I should also add that it was around this time I got my hands on two great anthologies that served as my primers on contemporary free verse by American poets—Naked Poetry and the The New Naked Poetry, edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. The poets featured in these volumes taught me almost everything I needed to know to read, feel, understand and write poetry as a young novice. And they matter as much to me now as they did then.

Finally, I’ve grown to appreciate poetry as a discipline that connects us to our ancient past, to the oral storytelling and wisdom traditions of Africa, Ancient Greece, Native America and beyond, to the Vedic chants of ancient India, where the vibrational qualities of sound, feeling and meaning conspire to affect and direct the physical universe. After all, isn’t everything at the atomic and molecular level vibration?