What are your thoughts about reading your poetry in Cobourg at the POW! Festival?

I have no thoughts on it.

Please tell us about your most recently published book and also a little about any other books you've had that "saw print."

The most recent is a reprint of Flying Deeper into the Century and Virgin Science. I'm sorry I don't know what the second part of the question means - what is "book" if not something that "saw print"?

At POW!, do you plan to read pieces from your book (or books)? Do you plan to read new, unpublished work?

I'll read from the books.

How would you describe your poetry?

Various, omni-interested, chronicling all the psychological chapters of my life. As a rule, I don't describe it. I write it and leave description to critics.

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

When I was fifteen. I wrote essentially to hear a voice, or have my existential mirrored back to me in an environment that was mainly slum tenements and no intellectual discourse.

What inspires you to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard?

Nothing inspires really, I either feel "called" to write something, or it comes reflexively, as breathing. Poetry is mainly a way of life, not an act - a creativity that finds its apex if you happen to be at the key-board or a recorder.

Can you describe (a little) your writing process in creating a new poem?

No, I can't. If I were that self-conscious, I wouldn't write. There is nothing predictably preparatory to writing and no two poems feel the same in the writing. The poem is the process and the process is the poem. I remember something about Macleish saying a "poem should not mean, but be". Conversely, the writing is not process but creation.

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about.
How do you respond to that?

I don't understand. What is a niche art form? Fact is few people read poetry. I used to think it was accessible and available to all, but that's like saying that most people have self-reflective lives. They don't. So, how do you expect poetry appreciation, when it requires reflectivity? Any poetry festival attracts people who are interested in beauty, or spirituality, or the self-discovery that comes by touching other articulated souls. It is for people who still have curiosity about other people and the world. If you look around at the world as it, you must see that number is proportionately small.

So, we mustn't get too messianic in our delivering of the gospel of poetry. As Auden said, "poetry makes nothing happen" except for those rare people who are called to listen for clues to their destiny. Festivals are good because they're beacons and markers for where people can find deeper meaning in their lives but it's delusional to think we can corral the mythic "average" person who is basically interested in mortgages, stocks and amenities