Welcome to my home page, which, like everyone else's, will be perpetually under construction, like my life, and perpetually apologetic about its ineffectiveness and state of not being more complete, also like my life. In this particular case, I confess that I've ended up spending lots more time on everyone else's web site than my own. Sites I've spent time on include that of Americans for the Arts and Caribbean Contemporary Arts, among others. This particular site has been allowed to lay dormant for quite a while, but I'm going to try to change that.

I returned from ten weeks in Thailand a couple of winters ago, and have popped up some photos from my trip there and elsewhere here.

I'm the former Director of Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, which basically means I tried to make sure that things on the project are running the way they're supposed to, and that we were making progress. Otherwise I tried to stay the heck out of the way of Arts Wire's excellent staff people and let them do what they were good at. I now work as an independent technology consultant focusing on nonprofit organizations. This means I facilitate discussions, work on technology plans, critique and help build websites, etc. I'm lucky enough that this work has taken me to five continents, where I've met scores of wonderful people.

I'm always interested in hearing suggestions about other things I could/should do, and I am very interested in potential collaborations with other groups and individuals, as my goal is to help promote the arts in all their forms and particularly to stimulate communication amongst artists, arts organizations and those interested in the arts. There are naturally issues of limited resources that sometimes act as a constraint, and there are more good ideas than I can possibly manage. This doesn't mean I won't try; it just means that reality does intrude once in a while.

Reality often intrudes for me in the form of a mailbox stuffed full of messages and a to-do list piled uimpossibly high, as the one word I've never seemed to learn how to say is, "no." Though I'm a writer, I'm still fairly slow at the process, so be patient - if someone comes up with a brilliant idea, I'm liable to take a bit to think about it as opposed to answering off the cuff. I also want to maintain the illusion that I'm the one in charge of my life and its priorities, even if I know that's not true, so I take the time I want to, as opposed to being pushed by the immediacy of the medium. Besides, I'm a poet, which means I can spend forever torturing a couple of lines about nothing much at all.

But please feel free to drop me a note if there are ideas or possibilities you'd like to discuss at jmatuzak@sunwheel.org.

That said, I've put up a few poems I'm done torturing from my book, Eating Fire, as well as now a couple of newer ones. And here's the obligatory Electronic resume.

I also want to encourage absolutely everyone to rush out and buy the brilliant book of poetry by Josie Kearns called New Numbers. I confess my extreme bias, as I'm married to her, but I'm not alone in that judgement...