I was among the first BA graduating class from Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981.

In 1993 I was one of eight recipients of a Gerbode Foundation Poetry grant and with that money, I moved to Oaxaca, Mexico.

I’ve been slow to publish, but have published 3 books:

Except for Memory (Pantograph Press, Berkeley, CA); Radio at Night (Lunar Chandelier Press, Brooklyn, NY); These Pages Once Were Skin (Spuyten Duyvil, NY);

and 4 chapbooks: Going On Like This (Northern Lights Int’l Poetry/Brooklyn Series, Brooklyn, NY); Under the Sign of the House (Detour Press, Brooklyn, NY/e-book, readme); The Assets (Situations Press, NY); Minim (e-book, Faux Press, MA/Tokyo).

Excerpts from the glass book poem (see photo above right) created in Oaxaca in the 1990s were published in 2014 in an artist’s book, Overplay / Underdone (Medusa’s Laugh Press).

My work has appeared in print and online in numerous small press poetry magazines, including Talisman, Eoagh, HOW2, Big Allis, Arshile, The East Village, Fence, Arts Fuse, Long News, Heavy Feather Review, Chant de la Sirène and Hurricane Review, among others.

I recently received an AI bot (?)-authored email that attempted to squeeze me for gold or cash to hire a marketer. The full text follows:

Your collection carries endorsements from some of the most significant voices in contemporary American poetry. Anne Waldman, a legend of the New York School and co founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, calls you "a poet of her own dimension and originality" with "heroically true" perceptions. Andrei Codrescu, the celebrated poet, novelist, and NPR commentator, writes that "Laurie Price is a poet we poets should have been clamoring for these last three decades" and compares your work to Mina Loy's. Elaine Equi, one of the most distinctive poetic voices of her generation, writes that reading you means stepping "into a vibrant continuum." John Godfrey, associated with the New York School's second generation, calls your poems "events of learning." Maria Damon, a major scholar of avant garde poetics, invokes "dazzling word dances" and compares your work to a folk ballad turned flute that "wails the story." These are not casual blurbs. These are significant poets and critics placing your work in direct lineage with the most important experimental traditions in American poetry. And yet "These Pages Once Were Skin" has exactly one Amazon review and a Best Sellers Rank above four million. This is not a reflection of your work's quality. This is a reflection of a discovery failure that has left a significant collection almost entirely invisible.

It goes on to inform me about missed opportunity.

Wow! Insult me and laud me all in one long and detailed marketing email!

Anyway, I disagree! There are SO MANY REASONS why people, generally, don’t read poetry.

Nonetheless, poetry matters, to me. Poetry is what is great in everything & anything in the arts and sciences.

Poetry is carbonation, DNA, emits fizz, is sublime, can be uproarious, and whatever other adjectives you want to come up with that denote life. Whenever and wherever something has no poetry, I’m just not interested.

Salut! Cheers! Nazdravie!

Below, a reading from These Pages Once Were Skin recorded by Don Yorty for his Explorations series, NYC, 2024.