 
Guy on the collaboration:
I first showed Norman my poems at about the same time I showed him my collages (which were why I first met him).
Norman didn't pay much attention at first to my writing — it wasn't, after all, what had brought us together —
until he read my book "Dancing Around the Volcano," which he "got" as viscerally and joyfully and completely as
he had "gotten" my visual art. We then began a "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" exchange — my poems and
his visuals — which we've continued to this day, and out of which come these collaborative art books.
We meet regularly — generally every week. Perhaps if I can describe one of our sessions, I might get at what I
find so extraordinary in our "dance." We usually sit facing each other, he on a fold-out bed in his living room,
me in an upholstered chair. He generally starts by showing me his latest art — full of restless, calligraphic,
delicate, burrowing balls-powered lines that caress and taunt his 'pornographic' men and women. Whatever he shows
me meshes completely with whatever he's been thinking and talks about: he will take sometimes very long silences
between words to sidle up as closely as he can into the heart of whatever darkness perplexes him — or to whatever
light may have just flashed for him. I suppose what moves me most about his struggle and his 'progress' is his courage:
moving from a deep secrecy about his sexual and emotional imagination to a determination to claim it in the light.
We both "claim" things theatrically. He'll get up, pace like a hungry Russian wolfhound, his voice ranging from whisper to
howl — I'll get up, gesticulating madly back at him — two galumphs in creative rut, kids in a sandbox. His configurations
of my poems astonish me. They are new in his hands. They show the light of his playful power and insight. I have never not
barked with delight when I've seen some new series of pages he's worked on. It is as if his homoerotic visuals underscore
something more implicit than explicit in my poems: "a gay man wrote these!" I find that somehow funny and engaging and right.
There's quite a circus here, I think. We plan to give it many acts.
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