The Story So Far

I was born in a house of skeleton keys and backyard climbing trees, in a neighborhood of back-alley wilderness, stray dogs and vacant lots, in Bay City, Michigan on Easter Sunday and the anniversary of John Wilkes Booth’s final theatre performance. I swear, I had nothing to do with either event.

Before it was Bay City, it was Lower Saginaw.

Before it was Lower Saginaw, it was John Riley’s Reserve, in Michigan Territory.

Before it was Michigan Territory, it was a British held territory. Before that, part of New France.

But before that, it was Mishi-Anishinaabaki, “Greater Anishinaabe Land.”

It is still Mishi-Anishinaabaki.

I spent my childhood absorbing the toxins of Dow Chemical, General Motors and dog knows what else. The Saginaw River was a constant abusive lover – I was drawn to her power and poisoned by her legacy. My first kiss was from Barbara in Joey’s backyard. The next day, I tried to kiss her again and she stopped me, saying, “yesterday was different – the sun was shining on me” and in that moment I was given my first line of poetry. I never looked back.

Origins

In some cases
it all begins with a backyard tree
in summer

A boy basketed
in the topmost branches
like the green arms of a first love
pressing into the bare flesh
of his thighs & back

From this height he sees his entire known world –
from the flag topping the courthouse
to the steeple of St. Stans
With such a view, better to close one’s eyes
lest one fall blind

The aroma of sunlit leaf &
the swirling dance of a nameless wind
take him & in that moment it happens:

His skin
for the first time
becomes an organ of the soul
The erotic pull of gravity
as alluring as a lullaby

this is years before he imagines
there could be words for such things
never suspecting
he will one day feel the same sensations
at the touch of a woman with midnight eyes

Incredible really
that a mere human could hold the same power
as that tree & summer wind
the delicious grip of gravity
No wonder adults cut down trees

& erect walls against the wind –
No wonder that boy
had no choice but to become a poet

My family moved from Bay City to nearby Essexville, where the local bully taught me I was a damn fast runner, which led to high school and Bay County records in the 300-meter hurdles, which led to a track scholarship. I was educated mostly in the forests and lakes of northern Michigan, but also at Saginaw Valley State University with a degree in honors English.

After college, I stuck out my thumb and rode the highways and backroads of the fraught and damaged United States, as well as long stints in Mexico and Central America. Time off the road was mostly spent at Pablo’s Fortress, a dilapidated delirium-scape apartment above the long-gone Paul’s Liquor on Saginaw’s southside, or at various cabins, tents and tipis among the pines and bracken ferns of Northern Michigan (Needmore’s Heaven, Needmore’s Next Door, Loon Point Camp, etc.) During these years, I published the chapbooks When God Was a Child, The Lost Writings of Miscellaneous Jones and Saginaw Songs (with fellow Saginista poet and comrade Al Hellus – RIP). I also published a deeply flawed autobiographical novel titled A Handful of Dust and edited an anti-war anthology called Jihad bil Qalam: To Strive by Means of the Pen. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I fronted the poetry band Miscellaneous Jones.

Other homes and respites from the road have included Symposia, a wrinkle on the map of reality, and Squatemala, an anarchist, independent nation at war with the City Noxious Weed Task Force, where the [legendary] Organic Beef Compound had their first and last performance. While at Symposia, I worked with the iconic Bedlam Theatre and published the first (and last) issue of CaNneD: A Sympographic Journal of Bedlam. While at Squatemala, I helped found and run The 303 Collective, a radical theatre and arts organization.

At The 303, as well as Pit and Balcony Theatre and the Bay City Players, I directed, designed and wrote dozens of plays, with favorites including Amadeus, Macbeth, The Exonerated, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Little Shop of Whores and The Women of Lockerbie.

Eventually, I found my way to the northern Rockies and the Grizfork Studio, a one-room cabin in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains near Livingston, Montana.

Writing at Grizfork Studio (Pica hudsonia)

Each day begins
with the conversations of magpies
who never run out of things to talk about

Each morning unfolds
with the fact of those mountains
who never feel the need to say a thing

I sit at my desk
with both & try to grab hold
of what lies between the two

On a good day
I come close

Writings there, as well as various Saginaw locations, resulted in the collection The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems, which more than anything was a way of saying goodbye to everything and everyone before this move West. In 2011, I moved into Livingston (im)proper, where my cousin’s wife Andrea and I opened the used and rare book store, Elk River Books. We’re now members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and have settled into our third and final home in the former JC Penny building on 2nd Street.

Writings from Livingston include Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, (now available in a 10th anniversary edition), These Creatures of a Day (a finalist for a High Plains International Book Award) and Life List: Poems (named a 2020 Honor Book Winner by the Montana Book Award).

In Montana, my theatre work continues (though at a less-frenetic pace), working with Bozeman Actors Theatre, the Blue Slipper Theatre and Montana InSite Theatre.

Performing poetry with musical accompaniment also continues with collaborations with The Northwoods Improvisers, The Big Sky Jazz Trio, Billy Conway (Morphine), Bill Payne (Little Feat), Parker Brown, Mike Cloud Devine, Dave Casario, Buff Brown, Garrett Stannard, Paul Lee Kupfer and others. For a brief time, there was another poetry band, Remington Streamliner, with Kevin Toll, Johnny Regan and Lenny America Woodward. Somehow, I’ve released two albums of spoken word and jazz with members of Morphine and the Northwoods Improvisers, which led to the establishment of a record label, CrowVoice Audio.

Today, I’m enjoying a cup of coffee, or swilling a cheap beer, listening to Brahms or John Coltrane, flipping through the pages of Ulysses or Pablo Neruda, and hoping there will be more to this biography before I return to the crossroads one last time.