I see my role as translator or courier, one who can help give words, images, and cadenced measures to volatile sensations, intuitions, and insights.

I love the overlapping circles of the arts -- music and theatre, drawing and painting and sculpture, writing and oratory. I've long been fascinated by the ways different forms of art collide and blend. For me one of the greatest pleasures is creating and performing a theatre piece, combining writing, live music, skilled acting and movement in a striking visual setting.

My poems are fairly clear in dramatic situation and deliberately intense in their musical and rhythmical phrasing. I write about the pressures of being conscious in a world that is lethal and exceedingly beautiful. My intent is to find combinations of words commensurate with experiences such as love, parenthood, political engagement, and our daily awakening to the land around us.

As a writer I am not prolific, but in the past decade I have maintained a steady relationship with the writing of poems and essays, meanwhile meeting the responsibilities of family, a full-time editorial job, construction from scratch of the house we now live in, and moonlighting as a teacher and book reviewer. In the past half-dozen years, I believe I have written poems that effectively articulate what I value, artistically and humanly, as reflected in my first collection, the chapbook One Another (Chapiteau Press, 1999).