Gary Siegel didn’t aim to be a poet.  But he did discover early that words would pour out of his mind and   onto the page when he got into a certain “zone”.  For a long time, he used this to write reports in school and creativity seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.  In school though he didn’t take to poetry, maybe because the teachers who read it to him had no passion and no vision.  It seemed to his young self to be an old dried up thing.                                                                                                                         

That changed abruptly in the 70’s when he began to hang out with poet friends and attend their readings.  He got the chance to play music for them, in a little-known performance form called a Choreopoem.    It was here that he really soaked up poetry and begin to write some of his own. 

Then he got the chance to hear Allan Ginsburg and William S Burroughs during a summer in Colorado.  The chance to hear and to feel living poetry, and discuss how to create it completed the transformation from bored high school student to avid fan.  Fan that is and aspiring creator.

His day job as a therapist fit his proclivity to explore consciousness and what creates a balanced life.  This also served him well as he began to write more consistently, much of it catalyzed by spending time alone in nature.  His nature poems were not just paeons to beauty or solitude, they were also explorations of states nature produced in him and explorations of what that meant for life as we understand it in the mundane and in the extravagant.

Diving then into the poetry scene in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley he experiences living poetry regularly.  And as the founder of the Kingston NY’s branch of the Poetry Brothel (a worldwide endeavor) he has coordinated and performed in poetry evenings ripe with music, spectacle and poetics.  It is in these readings that he has continued to hone his work and his explorations.  His current work “In the Cradle of Silence” is a distillation of the last 5 years of focused writing on a wide range of aspects of life.  It is presented in a “greater than the sum of its parts” collection of his Poetry in its many flavors.