The title of this site is a reference to a moment about 20 minutes in to the Oliver Stone movie "The Doors" when the band is doing one of its first gigs at Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Strip and Jim Morrison is singing "Break On Through." He is clutching the microphone tight to his chest while he sings, facing back to the wall, away from the audience. The other band members, seeing the crowd's response to their music, kept chiding Morrison: "Turn around, Jim! Face The Crowd!"
Art has both a private and a public component regardless of whether both are implemented by the artist. There is not only art for art's sake, and art for the artist's sake (salvation) but there is also art for the species' sake, the addition to the sum total of all human creation, the filagree of the noosphere. We as a species are changed by our creations -- all our creations, whether large or small, good or bad -- whether we want to own up to that fact or not and we all, as artists (or just creative living human beings) can choose the level on which we want to engage with that.
These poems were written over the course of thirty years (with a large gap in the middle where I was too pre-occupied to apply the sustained concentration that -- for me -- poetry requires). Though I read many of them in public, only one collection was ever published, back in 1975. Photography has been an ongoing passion the entire time.
The internet is an anonymous crowd for the most part, but the relation of the artist to the world need not be that personal or intimate, in the conventional sense, to function. There is always an audience, whether present or merely implied; there is always a crowd; there is always art (whatever the nature of the artifacts our lives throw off). The question is whether we are willing to take the risk of facing that crowd and owning up to our own creations.
Note: the images and voice recordings on this site are large and really only appropriate for those with a high speed internet connection.