B ack in the mid 70's, it occurred to me that poetry was never meant to be read off a page. Poetry started from a need to express the metaphysics of profound experiences and was probably encountered as a performance custom. It was performed by fathers about the physical, metaphysical and emotional intricacies of the "hunt," by mothers while laying the foundations of culture, by young hunters and warriors about their first glimpse of mortality, by young lovers about their firsts glimpse of immortality.... Each re-enactment streamlined, abstracted, and extracted the essentials of the performance. The poem was born and was experienced with visuals and sounds in real time.

With the advent of literacy and the printing press (an efficient storage and retrieval medium), poetry migrated to the page and became a purely literary and linguistic tradition. It became something that belonged in a book, and was separated from the original form. Dance, music, and acting, the other elements of the form, remained real time traditions, while poetry became a non-real time art form. Now, even when performed, it is done as if being read off a page.

When I write a poem, however, the incipient spark that motivates it can usually be described as a metaphysical, timeless space, composed of visuals, sounds, emotions, scents, taste, and sometimes, words. Simply reducing it to words seems to leave out a lot of the power and profundity of the initial moment. I started doing performance poetry in an attempt to retain the power and non-linguistic elements of the primary inspiration, to go full circle and recreate the original art form,

In the early 80's, with the advent and mass proliferation of electronic media, the video portapack, and the VCR (an efficient storage and retrieval medium), I started experimenting with my theories about "real time" audio visual poetry within the video format. I also played with integrating those theories with contemporary forms of poetry (prose poetry, concrete poetry, etc.). The "Unity Gain Series" was the result of those experiments.