I am a poet and an electrician and Tucson has been my home since 1971. Brenda and I married in 1974. We have two adult daughters. It is my pleasure to mix poetry and business and many a time after reciting poetry for a client, I become the listener to another’s recitation, typically of some old poem from their youth. For many years, I helped organize a poetry festival that brings together poets Laureate, well known and lesser known poets, along with local poets of Tucson for a weekend of readings. There also continues a statewide contest for high school poets with prizes from local businesses.

I believe poetry, at its best, to be out primal language. Its vocabulary of images from our natural world is instinctively recognized and known with an understanding that precedes and gives foundation to abstraction and intellectualization. Writing serves memory. Memory serves speech. It is in our vocalizing of the peom that we reanimate it and lift it from its half-life in the shade of the closed-up page. The best poems outlive their era and locale and when given the breadth of life, unify the there with the here, and the then with the now.