Welcome to my site, and thanks for checking it out.  I just started it in January ’12, and am still building the content.  Though I find myself adverse to blogging, I’ve decided to update this front page on (or very near) the first of every month, at least for a while, to see how it goes.  And to kick myself to stay in touch with the world at large (or at least to imagine that I am).  So if you think of it, tune in around the 1st or 2nd of each month, to see if I manage to be interesting.

If you already know me, skip the next paragraph.

For those unfamiliar:  I’ve been running around the U.S. doing words in a certain order (and sometimes in an uncertain order) for thirty-odd years now.  Sometimes the words are said out loud, sometimes they’re scrawled across objects, and sometimes they’re even in poetic form.  Am I responsible for them?  I don’t know!  Whatever the case, you can read an official, third-person-and-everything version of my past if you want by clicking on Bio, as well as check out all kinds of work on the pages herein.

So we find ourselves in mad month of March, in rain and wind and rutting-time, and I find myself titling this post “March Hæres.”  And why?  First, because I’m a mammal, and therefore hirsute.  Because the Middle English “hær” so nicely blends the hair with hare.  And because I’m feeling my mammal, feeling my hæres a fair bit this early spring.  I’ve just come out of a muted painful year with a dagblasted torn-up knee, all surgeried and healing now and flooding with the ol’ shoobeedoobeedoo once again.  Moxie’s on the rise.  Arm hairs on the rise.  Spine on the rise, all mammaled up and the hare is loose.  Because March is the month of the dragonbunny, and I’m a-ridin’ the fire road home.

Terrific life-filled visits this past month with Jane Ormerod and Lonely Christopher, both in from NY, and Regie Cabico in from DC, with words and surds leaking out in abundance.  Jane was down at the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival (didn’t make it, but heard it was epic), and Christopher and I did a dna-bending reading along with Ted Rees in Berkeley.  Regie brought down the house with a new monolog at the Magic Theater, as part of their Asian Explosion 2012.  Also a nice and unexpected reconnection with Justin Bond, in town for a few performances, with whom I hadn’t had a chance to chat in years.  I saw two terrific readings from v’s new autobiography, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels.  This is a time of connecting and re-connecting for me, most valuable.  Energy is high, and coming back to myself I find me bounding about town with a big old wit-eating grin.  Still got that thing, but now I look to a month of filling the tanks, of stoking that dragon moxie choo-choo fire for a vivulous run on the year.  And yeah, maybe I’ll slip out a bit for the wild wick as well.  Wakkata-wakkata.

Just finished a series of poems called Questions – an unusually pretty pentametric set of six – part of a collaboration with poet and artist Bill Mercer, and have posted a few new ones in Fresh Words.  More on that there, so check ’em out.  I’ve also just added content to the Anthologies page, finished listing all my books on the you guessed it Books page, and started on the Performance page as well, where I’ve thrown a few tolerably good videos from recent readings.  Look for more there soon, as I’m going to start converting some of the old vhs archives and throwing a few of them up as well.  And there are other additions and surprises throughout the site, which I’ll continue to add over the coming weeks.

Lovely moment:  just finished a project, just got health back, just put this site up, and here I have a month of open prospect: OPEN FIELD!  Gimme some sky, gimme some why, gimme a big breeze and a battered pack and something to look at every day, and I’m on my way.  Anywhere is fine.  Reminds me of a really old happy poem, from 1983 or so, so here you go.

And here we are.  Have a March.

Yours truly,
Richard