As poet Adam Cornford has said, too many of us tend to think that poetry is "easy to write and difficult to read." I'd like to substitute the word "playful" for the words "easy" and "difficult." This site stages the substitution, and puts it into practice. Or, as a shortcut, skip ahead to the always in-progress "HyperPoems" page on starve.org.

As I composed this site, I tried to recall my own classroom introduction to poetry, a class at Kent State University with Lloyd Mills. That particular class helped me see poetry as any public art form—something both serious and fun. This was the first time, for me, that poetry inside a classroom was energetic and contemporary and connected to the wider world of politics, community, love, sex, pain, and joy. In short, Lloyd's class taught me something that I always remind my introductory poetry students at Columbia College: taught me that poets are human beings like everyone else, no more special or less special than any other humans who produce art, and that poets—like all of us—eat, sleep, drink, go to the bathroom, fall in and out of love, like and dislike their families, and want to experience happy, fun, fulfilling lives.

I think I achieved this spirit in the site. Of course, these pages are still in progress . . . like everything else, including my breakfast plans tomorrow (Wheaties or Barbara's Sweetened Puffins Cereal?). But they are finished enough that I've used them in my Introduction to Poetry class this semester. By next semester they will be absorbed in The Starve Site.