"The Place in Which Our Passions Meet"

Greetings World,

This year, I've been fortunate enough to do a number of things, including having some poems published, performing more out of state, etc. One of the things that I'm most happy about, though, is collaborating.

Earlier, I had the opportunity to jump on one of Gabriel Newell's songs called Breathless. You can hear some of his material here http://www.myspace.com/gabrielnewell and see us perform a version of Breathless with the lovely and talented Megan Howard here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsqPI5pFpks. While we're speaking of Megan, you can peep her out here as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oSvdK_bmzg

I've been in talks with a number of other musicians and artists, and a lot of collaborations are still pending. However, on Monday night of this week, one such projects came to fruition.

Kristen Rogers is a photographer and artists. She's been doing live artwork for the Speakeasy poetry open-mics that I run, and the idea to collaborate on a piece struck me a few weeks back. We discussed concepts and themes for a while, and then she decided on a scenario. her idea was to have a "Yellow-orange background with an intricate tree and the grass will be made of words." Once she laid it out, I started trying to fill in the blanks and bring something to life through words. My job was to build a story for the piece, and by no means was it an easy assignment.

After MANY misfires and concepts I quickly lost interest in, I watched a documentary on Anne Sexton, who is one of my favorite poets. Thinking about her life just gave me the idea to write from the perspective of someone in a mental hospital.

This past Sunday, I managed to write a pretty good bit of something I'm sure I can flesh out and complete down the line. It was enough to give Kristen a sizable amount of text to use for the painting, though.

You can check out how things turned out above, if you haven't already done so. I was really impressed at how she executed the whole thing, and when you take into account how swiftly she managed to put everything down, it's even more of a feat. Give it a look and let me know what you think.

Blessings