I ’ve had my own website since 2003. Initially, it was a compendium of “everything I’ve done,” an exhaustingly unreadable mishmash of muses and manuscripts, photographs and pursuits. I even tried to upload each review I’d written, every essay, and provide a sample poem from each of my books. In 2009, while I’m still a technophobe of sorts, I know enough about the web to understand a bit more about what’s palatable in terms of number of visuals and the amount of words on a “page.” Thus, I asked Chris, my life companion, partner in music and website creator, to reconfigure the material on the site, make it a little more lively, a lot more engaging, a portal rather than an archive.
At the same time, the aim remained to reflect the diversity, the variety of my life in art. Not only are my professional activities as a poet, or even as a tutor/workshop leader profiled, but also my amateur photography, for instance, more perhaps because my way of seeing the world influences the way I enter the written word than because of my desire that this practice be valorized in and of itself. Additionally, my solo work is highlighted, but the collaborative work I’ve increasingly engaged in over the past six years is also now a dominant aspect of the site. No poet creates in isolation; no poet has one source or interest set. Revealing the multiple sides of a working artist’s life is my primary intent here. I used to want to hide my hardcore musical interests from my academic colleagues and conceal the fact that I have a Master’s degree from my fellow headbangers. The site draws all these passions together. It also pays homage more to my living, active collaborators, to what is vital in my life right now, than erecting virtual shrines to the dead Muses I once honoured or attempting to compile trajectories: photos of childhood, for instance, or pictures from the beginning of my performative vocation.
I’ve always been addicted to nostalgia. While my original site strained to capture this perhaps beautiful sickness, the revamped version, shaped in the era of Facebook and post a hard-drive crash, which led to the loss of years and years of memorabilia, seeks to mark more current consuming embroilments, only offering brief or submerged tracings of what came before. I’ve detached a lot since 2003. The more one creates, the more one must cast away. What is retained only time tells in its weird, unpredictable tickings. The mystery is that we remain ineffable, more and more so as we become increasingly accessible, naked on the screen like fish in their glaringly transparent bubble homes, too slippery to grasp.
