Why is Poetry Important?

Art strengthens both community and diversity.  Whatever we write about makes it stronger.  Naming is very powerful.   An investment in the arts, in your own and that of others, is an investment in the soul.  Writing and poetry help people during times of transition to see ourselves in a larger context.

Poetry is a pattern language.  It is similar to visual art because it employs image but it creates an auditory or sound environment.

Poems have taught me important things.   They are a way of knowing.   My poems tend to have a voice that is located outside in the landscape as opposed to inside a domestic space.   I draw meaning from the natural world, from rivers and migrations.  

"River begins in the other world/ without time."   (from Undertow)

"near shore another story / places that no longer know me..." (from Echo & Lightning)

My collections of poems, in chapbooks or books or in performances, are mosaics.  The individual poems are arranged in a way to create a larger story.  My stories are not escapist.  Instead of going away from reality, they go into it in ways that alter it for me.