Alex Ferguson is a ten year veteran of the stage who ventured into playwrighting with the one-acts; The Smoking Man and The Relationship of the Dead, both produced by the Playwrights' Theatre Centre. In 1993 he co-founded the Action Poetry trio AWOL LOVE VIBE's 'Exstatic Almanac' while particpating in the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. AWOL Love Vibe's 'Exstatic Almanac,' has recently been published by Toronto's Insomniac Press as book and CD.

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Here's what I'm going to do - walk you through it - as if in the moment - and so I'm going to make an issue of the problem - but first the solution: the mouth opens at the moment the mind caves in to the crush of an idea (just as Lorca dangled an arsenic lobster in the face of intelligence) - too much damn thinking is the enemy of poetry - too much thinking is a fat ass angel sitting on voodoo - you have to let the devil tongue jabber through you - ego is a fat ass angel marshalling children through Sunday school - ego is a sucking gastropod - ego seeks out a singularity of place - you must blather now in service of a multiplicity of expectation - the ever flowering mess of constant formation - we're seeking poetry with no agenda - and it is brilliant on your mouth - brilliant except where it is humiliating - except when personality demands place and you become a feeble imitator - you speak for a borrowed persona -you speak with every voice but your own - pop singers, blues men, movie stars, anchormen for christ's sake, other poets - there's nothing authentic about you - you're lower than a slam poet posing as a beatnik - but still but still - it's worth it-worth it for those other moments - those moments of personal obliteration - when you speak, not with the borrowed tongue, but with the given tongue - the praise tongue, the lover tongue, the body tongue.

So much shame. You who call yourself an "oralist". So much shame, and confusion when you commit your breath to print. In who's honour? For what craving ego puppy? Stuff it back in the closet. You have given suck to the sell-out. Right? What business do you have adding to the, meaningless cacophony of the bookseller's shelf? Is it possible to speak through this safety?

Who's comfort do you think you're making love to?

Last spring, AWOL Love Vibe improvised 365 poems over three days for a book called 'Exstatic Almanac'. We created an accompanying CD called "Verbomotorhead" combining vocal improvisations with highly manipulated studio processing. I loved both of these projects. I, who had devoted myself for several years to poetry, created in the moment in front of a live audience. What I loved most about performing poetry in this way was how far it was from the presumptions of theatre. Naked in front of an audience, I found myself abandoning character and artifice. The communication was direct in a way that theatre artists pay lip service to but rarely achieve.

Strangely I've been forced back into product manipulation with both the book and CD. The horror of the story is that I derive immense pleasure from the power of such manipulations. I find myself elated-an artist happily at war with his own beliefs, and gravitating toward an ethic of pragmatism to justify himself.

How is it possible that this ultra-live unit of three performing poets exploded into two contrary mediums with such precision? By re-inventing itself for each new form. The truth is there are three versions of AWOL Love Vibe. One is a free wheeling live improv poetry outfit, the second is a meticulous studio band devoted to creating a hip and modern musical context for its poetic pretensions, and the third is a literary trio that insists on breath and body as the inspiration for text.

AWOL is on the cusp between subjectivity and public self- reflection. Our next endeavour will be to define ourselves for posterity. No joke. We're about to set up the AWOL snap shot for the poetry family photo album. We need to codify our practice as an act of self preservation. We are outrageous, and because of this we are endangered.