About Digital PoetI'm a language lawbreaker, a wizard of words who shares experience, insight and personal perspective on everything from social issues to business blunders through the art of spoken word.
My life has run the gamut from poor house to penthouse; from damaged, dark, dirty and defeated to halcyon, hopeful and ultimately happy. As I recall memories, I manifest them with a grammatical sledgehammer style as slam poems. I've been engulfed by the world of the internet for over five years now - and I love my 'day job'. Outside of work, I'm big on sports, outdoor activities, movies and the arts (written, spoken and expressive). Most importantly, I'm a happy husband with a super-loving wife and the proud father of two - one girl, one boy. They keep me on my toes (and create awesome topics for slam poems!) About The Name Digital PoetBefore I started using the name "Digital Poet", I performed at poetry slams as "Friction". It was a name that I felt conveyed my general attitude and previous resistance to society and rules. And that name was the thread that ran through most of my poetry. I wrote poetry about shooting heroin, poems about going through withdrawal and poems about opiate addiction. I also wrote spoken word pieces about life on the streets and the crime and grime that came along with that. My poetry was down and dirty, it was raw and real. Friction represented my inner and outer conflicts - the conflicts that have been with me my entire life. Apart from that, I just thought it was a pretty cool name.
After I had traveled on the road to recovery for some time - a road that I still travel - I began to get my life back on track. I was clean. I had kicked heroin and other opiates, I wasn't even sniffing coke, smoking weed or drinking any more. Drugs were becoming less and less the root of my friction. I got a job in media and marketing, and that has evolved now to digital media - search marketing and search engine optimization mostly. I've grown very fond of this profession. In college, I was an art student. Well, to be honest, I wasn't much of a student. Its a long story. The skinny is that the only real classes I attended were art classes - drawing, painting, digital art and digital animation. So I combined my love of the arts with my love of poetry and my love of digital media. It was only inherent that I became "Digital Poet". And this site is how I interpret digital poetry. |
Some examples of slam poems:
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What is digital poetry to me?
For me, Digital Poetry is an artistic outlet that bestirs the intersection of digital media and life experiences. Digital Poetry is what happens when you wrap digital technology and poetics around a life event - and that could be anything from witnessing a newborn enter existence to expressing an experience with music to sitting in traffic to cutting a grapefruit - etc.
Unknowingly and unsuspectingly, art is created every day - by me and by you. But I've had a passion for drawing, writing, creating and performing at some point in my life, so I self-proclaim myself as some level of craftsman with a dignified authority. Digital poetry has allowed me to break the chains of tradition with my own definition; this site allows me to reassign meaning to digital poetry the way I see it.