I remember neither the first poem I read nor the first poem I wrote but I can remember the first poem that I was embarrassed of having written.

I was 11 and it was the year 2000 and I was freshly online. I was sad and mad and often felt bad but I was unable to articulate why in any concrete way. Looking back I can tell you that these feelings of bad, sad, and mad were likely the result of:

• undiagnosed mental illness
• being bullied at school due to acting strange (likely the result of undiagnosed mental illness)
• being bullied at school as a result of being what adults described as husky
• puberty rolling in a little too fast

These aspects combined with some environmental factors:

• spending more time with trees than people
• spending more time with books than trees

to produce a melancholic mind, an overactive imagination, and an inability to focus very long on anything.

I have no idea what poetry meant to me at that age, but it felt like the correct media to vent frustrations that were as vague as they were intense. This first poem that I was embarrassed by is lost. I wrote my poetry in plain text files using notepad.exe in Windows 98. An internet friend (likely one found via AIM) had offered to take my poetry and combine it with art from manga. The first poem I remember being embarrassed by was layered, probably in papyrus font, in white over black next to a brooding angel man from a CLAMP manga. The poem was about feeling bad about nothing in particular. I recall imagery of shards of glass in my soul. I better remember the image I tried to express: stained glass, colorful and beautiful, all smashed up and covering me.

In the year 2000 this poem made me feel cool, edgy, mysterious, and various other positive feelings which were essential to shoring up defenses against relentless self criticism and despair (years earlier in a journal I kept in the first grade I had written: "I liked the story of the ugly duckling because I am also ugly"). Once my peers at school began to find out what poetry was they realized they hated it, so I learned to be cautious about discussing or writing poetry.

Beginning in high school I took the reading of poetry more seriously. I read a lot of Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, ee cummings, W.S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and more I can't remember. I distinctly remember one collection by Vietnam veterans that my dad gave me. I printed one of them out and used it as the cover of a binder in 11th or 12th grade. I can't find this poem now on the internet, but it had the phrase "I fail to be mesmerized." I had become a furiously cynical anti-nationalist in the Bush years and it resonated with me. In this time period I kept writing poetry and do have those, but you can't see them. If you work very, very hard you might find my teenage Deviant Art account where I posted poetry.

I started college and instead of poetry I focused on programming, noise music, and to a lesser extent, philosophy. Poetry became a priority again in my senior year when I had the opportunity to do a thesis. It was open ended and naturally my inability to deeply engage with formal systems meant I was a middling computer scientist. I decided it would be an art project and, inspired as I was by the cut-up work of WS Burroughs, decided to make software for doing that with large quantities of text.

(The first piece of software was, arrogantly, called weltanschauung and didn't work very well at all. I rewrote it after college and then, again. I have a new, similar piece of software called Trunkless that is in spirit yet another rewrite but has a very different design and premise.)

All of the cut-up work I was doing re-inspired me to write fully original poetry like I had in high school and earlier. This inspiration culminated in taking a certificate course at the Independent Publishers Resource Center (RIP) in Portland, Oregon. By this point I had become embarrassed by my cut-up poetry for not being "real" enough and muddled through the course trying and failing to produce anything I could be proud of. I finally gave up and went back to cut-up for my final project. These cut-up poems got the first and only praise from my classmates I received in the entire course. Still, the experience filled me with discomfort and proud as I was of my new cut-up collection I drifted away from poetry again.

I've come tentatively back in the past few years. I read a lot more poetry than ever before and have become fascinated with the kind of formal works I thought I could never write (and used to resent). I've been publishing some pieces to my blog but haven't made much progress towards a new collection.

I'm still fighting to stay ahead of the melancholic howling. I'm not much better at stringing words together. My understanding of poetry has changed, though. My goal was never to put words on a page but instead to get feelings out into the world. Feelings cannot exist in the world; not in and of themselves. The contours of an art object can only ever suggest the feelings that inspired it. This eternal impressionism is what I am forever after. This eternal impressionism is poetry (for me). Whatever it is I make--noise, websites, programs--is poetry, as I have come to understand it.

My desire has always been to serialize an internal feeling into something external. I have always suffered from an oft-painful surfeit of emotion and an inversely proportional ability to convey it through normal human means. Imbuing some artifact in the hope that someone else might feel something like I did or, at a minimum, acknowledge how I felt has always seemed more natural to me. I want to create things in the way that a volcano creates land or in the way that a wrecking ball creates piles of rubble: paroxysmally. I have to outrun the part of my brain that howls.

I could say I'm an "artist" but it raises too many reasonable questions to which I have only unreasonable answers. It's better to be a poet since that's usually a conversation ender. Few want to talk to a melancholic dreamer, a hopeful monster, a quixotic romantic. If you do, though, please check out my work. Or send me an email.