Cabinet-making and the contemporary imagination

Before becoming a serious woodworker, I was preoccupied with other art forms, primarily contemporary poetry and fiction. Film, sculpture, painting, music, and performance also seemed to be powerful genres in which the imagination could manifest itself most directly, and influence human lives with a magical force. As an undergraduate in the early 1970\u27s, I received a degree in literature. At that time the poetry readings I attended in New York City were as important as the books and ideas to which I was exposed in a progressive classroom situation. What I gained from this experience was a particular sense of aesthetics which I still practice to some extent as a woodworker. It is a way of thinking about material, a consideration of the maker\u27s responsibility, a sense of open form, and a consciousness of balancing the old and the new. These ideas established in those days are quite literally the matrix from which I began to practice woodworking