The pieces collected in Volume One of this four-volume collected edition [and reprinted on the web as time and Publisher’s Rights permit] date from my earliest experiences in San Francisco, following college, although they represent neither my earliest writing after college (published or unpublished) nor the first work I wrote after moving to the Coast. The first thing you might espy is that there is little in these pieces that in anyway reflects, or speaks of, or towards, such an experience, or change in experience, or environment; they are singularly ‘un-urban’. In fact, you could say they are aggressively the poetry of a rural sensibility; my only answer would be that, that was where, that was towards where, my vision was casting at the time, having been only so recently trans-planted to the unique environs of The City. I was not homesick; but some vision or re-version of the world I had purposefully abandoned was re-formed inside me; perhaps, necessarily, to sustain me. In any case.

My first publicly professed work was not that of a poet but of a playwright however, and although there was the occasional workshop reading and such, there was relatively few outlets for the scripts I was writing (as I lacked any association with an existing troupe or company) and a playwright sans venue is a sad and lamentable thing. For feedback I found myself attending open readings, workshops, and what have ye; I soon garnered a steady stream of invitations to the cocktail parties of friends as a sure source of entertainment; although I’m certain there are the same number of occasions I was not invited to for the same reason. It was in 1980 or thereabouts, at a bookstore reading hosted by Steve Kushner (aka Kush; one of his famous “Cloudhouse” readings) that I made a fateful turn. Kush taught anthropology at The New College of California, was a former student (if I remember) of a man I admired in the field, Jerome Rothenberg, was known for his field-work in the ethnography of both pre-Columbian and contemporary Meso-America, but for all that (or because of it) he was the measure of what I regarded as the Activist Artist, engaging the community directly (without mediation of institutional representation or management) and whose project at the time was to synthesize “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma” (a pun on Kafka of course) to provide what we would these days call a “brand” for performance art and performance poetics.

Well, anyway, I had brought to the reading that night a couple of scenes from a play I had been working on, and read them; later, after the festivities, I was in the kitchen with him making “a more medicinal tea” (as he called it) and he asked me if I could return there on a regular basis because, as he put it to me, “I dig your poetry”.

Now, it’s funny that I didn’t just take this as complimentary hyperbole, as in, “your stuff is so good it’s, yeah, it’s poetic…” etc.; rather, I actually read him as meaning he took me as working in a different genre, as though I was writing verse; he thought I was reading poems, not dialog, narrative, and scene directions (to be honest it was an honest mistake to make because everyone else was reading “poems” and regarded themselves as “poets” even if they were manifestly not). I never considered what I wrote to be poetry (noun as opposed to adjectively speaking), the poems I had previously written in fulfillment of assignment I thought of as uniformly mediocre and at no time previously did I consider myself a poet, even potentially. But there, at that moment (and owing as much to my increasing invisibility as a playwright at the time) I was offered the chance to so consider.

And I did so.