As a teacher, I've learned with practice how to get people excited about works of art: plays and exhibits, musical compositions, and especially books. During programs with the Vermont Center for the Book, Lebanon College, Community College of Vermont, the Vermont Council for the Humanities, Sterling College's Wildbranch Writers Conference, and Elderhostel, I often see my enthusiasm for particular a piece of writing, visual art, or performance rippling across the room, evident in an audience's responses. During the past decade, through dozens of public-speaking engagements, while I've learned how to give presentations that are probing yet accessible and entertaining, I've learned how to deliver my poems and those of other poets in a way that audiences find exciting and enjoyable.

I seek venues where I can blend the approaches I enjoy most: -- as a discussion-facilitator, exploring an audience's reactions to a shared encounter with potent works of art, and -- as a writer and performer, reciting aloud my own poems and those of others, classic and contemporary.

I believe I now have the maturity as a writer, scholar, and facilitator to combine my more cerebral pursuits with the performance skills I've gained working intensively with a series of experimental theatre and dance troupes.

What matters to many people in this age of unprecedented distraction and fragmentation are experiences of genuine connection - concentrated, mutual, sustained alertness. Think of those times when your own mind has been taken in, through conversation with other people and in contemplation of works of art, truly filled to the brim. What a contrast those moments are from the physical titillation and mental flotsam-and-jetsam of the commercial mass media.

My hope as a teacher is to help those who seek such experiences find the encounters they need, then to help them better understand and trust their own responses.

As an artist, my hope is to be exacting, absorbing, and vivid in rendering the world as it is - and as it could be.