Leslie Silton - Event Producer

Someone asked me just a few days ago if anyone knew of my work. I did a quick calculation and added it up, (fingers and toes working like an abacus): it comes to a few million people at least. Boy, was that was a shock. The truth is that I am both a visual artist and a poet. I also write short stories and do photography. In the past few years I've started working with collage and lately I'm now both a muralist and working on my first novel. My career as a poet started back in Greenwich Village, (New York City) in 1964, when I began showing up at the only coffeehouse I knew about - Le Metro - and I was nudged onto the stage to read my poems. It turns out that Alan Ginsberg (the Beat Poet) used to come in there (I didn't know who he was) and he asked me to contribute a page of poems (it was done on mimeo paper in those days) for his irregularly issued "Ninth Street Poets" magazine. Since then I've participated in many readings and open mics over the past 30-plus years both here in the USA and Paris, France when I attended American Center for Students and Artists. The emphasis for me has been in performance. But poets need chapbooks because you can't carry a live poet around in your hip pocket … so I have self-published 3 chapbooks so far (with more to come). Also, my poetry has been spread around by others - as when someone says to me: can I send that poem to my friends? (…all 153, 277 or 841 of them…) Sure. Therefore, since 1998 my work has been published on the internet quite a few times and that doesn't include the times I've sent work out, both solicited and unsolicited. I have read my poetry on radio programs in Los Angeles, Boston, and Miami. In the last couple of years several of my poems were recorded for different CD collections and read aloud either by myself or others on the radio on both coasts. Three of my short stories were recorded and broadcast the cable radio network here in Los Angeles.