I make my poetry out of what I love and what enlivens from the midst of the inglorious detail of everyday. What I am conscious of, am enamored with: tables, chairs, trees, shifting light across the yard, the movement of water and wind, all my accumulated rocks . . . each articulate a language beneath the language of the day-to-day. So it is a poetry of the ordinary made tangible by the commonplaceness of spirit.

My poetry is who I am at any specific moment plus who I always am. Only when I reach the self who is always me, a self mostly hidden, do I find the poem. Then my senses transmute, and what I see and what I hear filter through a psychic architecture both learned and innate. The innate provides a context, a heaven and hell, within which and through which my acquired forms take shape.

I always start from the immediate, what is close by in ear and eye. What is here and now is real, perhaps a Zen-like starting point, at least in the recognition that truth does not rest in words. But the poem is not simply the words, and is not process. Rather the poem can be found in the words, and through them. It happens when a reader shifts his or her way of perceiving after reading.

So a poem is only momentary, a thing waiting to happen. When it lies on the page or when it is sounded in air, it is only words; to be a poem, it must be received. A poem is cabbalistic in that way. And what is received, as Charles Olson reminds, is energy, from where the poet got it, transferred to how the reader assimilates it. Something that happens that can’t be said. But one knows a poem by the movement it produces.

In a poem, it is the quality of silence I listen for. It’s the air between the keystrokes, the arch of the brush, the lift of the pencil between the marks. It’s the space between the letters.

Listening here, I hear the angels grunting and singing their language. Like grain in the mill, grist in the till, the spirit challenges us, captures for a nanosecond those of us who listen for something else to hear.

H-E-A-R- here. What a poem is.

What we want from a poem.

What the experience of reading is.

We have constantly to reinvent ways around our closed poetic economies. We have to learn to read. Again. Anew.

Attack of the difficult poem, one title reads. Technology is language. System. Alert: our system has a crack, and much is escaping.

I'm a print poet who has been teaching literature at an art college in southwest Florida for 24 years. That experience along with my education (a PhD in poetry/Yeats, plus an MFA in creative writing/poetry, and a BA in math) have all conspired to steer me into exploring digital and visual poetry.

I'm a newcomer to visual poetry, though I produced my first videopoem in 2004 after acquiring a Mac, a Canon digital video cam and a few editing programs to play with. My experimentation has mostly been in trying to get a handle on how word, sound and image interact to produce a synthesized whole in both visual poetry (vispo) and videopoetry, in addition to absorbing the new technologies.

An attempt to capture visually what is conceptually at the root of the poem: a circle through time.

A mash-up of linear (and layered) sound with roving image.

Light as a Seed, Blind Man's Stick and First Language pair the human voice on soundtrack plus music, juxtaposed with video images on the screen

A walk through the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans.

Binding by Striking combines two contrapuntal voices, sound, and computer generated images. The second poem on this clip is a multi-voiced rendering of the poem Counterpoint with computer generated images and sound.

Mother Goddess is a videopoem where the text is superimposed over still and moving images.

In Alchemy, I play with multiple visual layers with sound and spoken word.

The Visionary Vernacular Language of Black Outsider Artists is a street documentary of two southern black outsider artists, Mary Proctor (from outside Tallahassee) and Purvis Young (from Overton near Miami). Mary was interviewed live in Atlanta at an outsider art fair. Purvis had a booth but had just been hospitalized, and he died shortly later. The clips of him in this talk are a montage of what's available.

3 poems by Amiri Baraka + Voodoo line dancers, Oct 31, 2008, New Orleans

The Adventures of Bunny Blaster & Rogue Bunny is a video fantasy that takes place at a toy factory.

I Look at the World and Growing Up are collaborations with local kids. Videofreestylin' . . .

The Miracle Stories of Lorenzo Scott is a street documentary made in 2008 in Atlanta at an Outsider Artist Fair.

Granddad’s work to improve the lot of black people in SC extended from his work at the SC Extension Service where he spent decades (see dates on trophy) hiring and developing black professionals in the field. It was his view was that the best way to reach and educate black farmers in SC was to have black educators doing the talking. This trophy was awarded to him after he was named "Man of the Year" for the third time by this group.

Granddad always treated all people with respect and promoted doing what we could to help everyone be better off and he quietly conveyed that meant people of all races. Taking these kinds of actions in SC in the 1920-1955 period was not all that common. He served on Roosevelt's War Labor Board, on the Board of Governors of the Charlotte branch of the Federal Reserve, as Director of the Extensions Service, and in many other ways, but his actions in this particular area is the one of which I am most proud. When Granddad passed away, my father asked if there was something of his estate I would like to remember him by, and this is what I asked for.

- John Britton Watkins