I would have to say that I am as much moved or influenced by the work of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, et. al, as I am by the work of my friends and of my near contemporaries. I can remember sitting before my first mentor, Professor Morgan, as he loaded me down with volumes and volumes of antiquated verse. I was fifteen.

I didn't want to pour over ponderous tomes of metered rhyme. I thought I was an artist. I wanted to be free to express myself in my own style. His sharpened, often repeated, reply, that I could not begin to develop my own unique style until I knew who had gone before me (and what was said, and said, and said - again), was enough to make me realize that crucial point: In order to find my own voice, I had to first understand the intricacies of pure poetry. I had to become intimately acquainted with the management of language, the lyrics and imagery, that make poetry an art. I also had to recognize genius before I could begin to turn it inside out.

The art of turning it inside out was another lesson that I gleaned from Professor Morgan. Though this was done by feeding from a soft hand more than by battering, it was still a lesson and a strong one. After I continued to pass his barrage of interviews and tests on Whitman, Byron, Edna St. Vincent Malay, et al., I was given small issues of very contemporary, and even underground, work. He always smiled in handing this to me because he knew that this was where I wanted to be. This was the work of my near contemporaries, people with strong voices and powerful statements, that spoke clearly and concisely , in familiar language. To this day, I can still see his gaunt and crinkled face, his eyes piercing my resistance. I can hear his voice, strong, in clipping my vagrant groans with absolute authority (and another test) as he brought his hand down over another stack of books, each one marked with tabs over those works to which I was to pay particular attention. I can see the smile, edging from the corners of his mouth, as he folded select pages he had taken from many of the small press magazines of the time. Xeroxed pages of Thunder Sandwich, bits of Brautigan, Kerouac, Burroughs, and others, were neatly folded under the cover of the required reading. "This is for after," he would say, all the while knowing that it was, for me, the most coveted of all desserts.

In my eyes, each of these issues was a spoon of tangible genius. From the freeing of language in the work of Mr. Burroughs, to the soft, and almost romantic, hemp fueled spinnings of Mr. Brautigan, to the hard-honed, unsparing stories wrought by Mr. Chandler; each embodied an element of unique vision, and was told in a unique voice. I realized then, if I was to become a writer, I would have to learn and undo, not only the classics, but my near contemporaries as well. I would need to be able to pull the salt from them, and leave the rest, in order to evolve, in my own time, and with my own unique voice.

I see my own work is a collage, or montage, of this practice, containing the salt of all layered among the snippets from my own experiences and from my own point of view.