ABOUT THE AUTHOR



The Confessions of Mad Mar Mistryel Walker (?)
As a lifelong tinkerer in many arts, this blog reflects my interests both local and far flung. It's not a comprehensive view of anything.  
I like to pull on loose threads, make and view art, view performances, muse about this stark, stunning world.
At times my thread-pulling activity becomes a poem or an essay, sometimes a painting or a song.
I've been posting online on a website or blog with the names Metaphoratorium and/ or Mistryel.com since the 2000s.  (Before that it was AOL) User names on Prodigy and RCN,  and  .mac - later various blog urls with  puzzleddragon, madmarwalker, artsattic etc etc) 
For the record, I've got a BS from Charter Oak State College followed by over 30 unmatched, overpriced  masters credits. I'm a poet and painter, singer-songwriter, a performer, musician and lifetime job-hopper and odd-jobber - including work as an optics technician, mainframe operator, choir section leader and soloist, pet and barn sitter, flower merchandiser, office manager, newspaper reporter, columnist and editor, e-zine editor - lastly as a family-caregiver. Retired now. Miss my patient even now.
I will always remain a possibility enthusiast.
                              - Mad Mar "Mistryel" Walker

In the poetry department:

Two chapbooks: Inverse Origami the art of unfolding, (1998), and Tabernacle of Bees (2011). Founded and was editor-in-chief of the lit e-zine Bent Pin Quarterly.  During the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Cambridge, MA, I was lucky enough to be a competitor on the good-hearted, all-for-poetry - Team White Plains, NY.

My poems have been published in a variety of venues online and in print. (I also served seven years in local print journalism as a staff writer and general assignment reporter writing about local doings and government shenanigans. The Acorn Press Newspapers, the North Conway Reporter, The American Journal, and a few others as a stringer or correspondent, finally the desktop Sacopee Valley News then back to Acorn which by then had become Hersam-Acorn. Don't know what it is by now....)

A few Online Poems:

Playlist of my poems on Youtube:
.......................................

In the art department:


Studied drawing and painting with both Robert Albereti and Barbara Grossman at Western CT State U, sculpture with Alexander Shundi then Janet Muro at the Wooster Community Art Center --- plus an Art History course with Dr. Paoletti, 2 studio drawing classes, composition with collage at the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan

.....................................

In the music department, my statement from the days when I was a practicing musician:
 

Singing is a practice - a form of meditation, an entry to the flow of being. Performing - both poetry and music - are a connection with inner energies and a method to express what is in you and be heard, to share joy, light-hearted irony and all the depth of human emotion. To be heard by other hearts, by a community of audience and performers. At least that's how it seems to me...

And song-writing has been a very personal form of expression which has engaged my attention since I was 11 years old. To me songs are part story, part poem, part howl and sometimes part standup comedy.

I strive and practice daily to perfect my own stylings, to finish and document my songs, to be a better and more secure performer in order to better communicate our common human condition, the nuances of the heart, the ironies of our social structure and the beauty of the cosmos.

  
    Children often sing themselves to sleep as I did for many years. It was a happy thing, Then came chorus and glee club, guitar lessons, then the senior talent shows in high school, coffeehouses when I was in college, the year of car payments made playing weekends at a little bar. Piles of paper song revisions. And there were the life experiences that inspired them - infatuations, plans, friendships, a marriage, a divorce, political  insanity, crazy jobs and people, some things, not  so happy. Some silly. You know, life....
 
     In high school studied guitar with square dance musician who tried very hard to get me use a pick. (Oh well.) I took piano, flute and chorus. After high school I studied for a Bachelor of Music degree (including four semesters of music theory, three semesters of music history, and three years of voice studies with a classical baritone, John Taylor) and also summer of voice coaching with Charles Pope. 
a pub shot from the 90's     
    In the early 70s I performed quite a bit in singer-songwriter way for  churches, youth groups, coffee houses, etc around the Philadelphia area. And later in my 20s and 30s, it was small bars, restaurants, coffeehouses and private parties here in New England. When I stopped performing in the mid 1990s, I had already written almost 100 songs, many of which I have forgotten. I stopped playing my own music because if was autobiographical, in many cases recalling things I needed to forget.
At Casablanca    
    So ...  I stopped singing my own songs and went classical for a while. Quite a while. Actually for a decade, taking lessons from a dramatic tenor, (John Shackelford) a swedish soprano (Dominique Hellsten) and a variety of other instructors, working for churches, a memorable gig or two, with a string quartet, at an opera gala, a recital or two. That is another long story. (Check the schedule page which runs WAY back to 69). 
    However, after the suicide of a friend in Nov of 2008, I walked away from a classical church job I had at that time. I had been reminded how short life is and I needed to reconnect with that essential energy.  Thinks didn't unfold neatly, but I don't regret any of it. Forward is only direction the river of life can run..... 
                   thePuzzled Dragon,(my multimedia carrying on)
PoetsAndTheirPoems, (Poets poeting)
            



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)