Articles

I’ve received a lot of advice over the years, and I think almost all of it has been good, but the pieces that have stuck with me the most are those that I received at exactly the time when I needed them most. At eight it was: “You know, you don’t have to end every poem with the word ‘eternity.'”

I spent twenty years in New Mexico, a time when I was trying to reconstruct my life, like Williams, after losing my faith. My essay pays tribute to the desert Southwest, where I found a measure of healing.

The inspiration came when I was in my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, and my family and I found a bird on the asphalt. Then a neighbor told me, “This is the season when the baby birds fall out of their nests.”

At the time I wrote “Next,” the last poem in the series . . . , I was thinking a lot about posterity and lineage and visibility as a gay woman who was neither a wife nor a mother. I didn’t know in 2006 that I would ever be able to marry my partner legally—which I did (also in Bellingham!) in 2014—so one of the questions at the heart of the poem is “How will there be a record of our life together?”

I hope the video in the piece conveys my primary aim: to explore and celebrate nonsense. What readers might not notice immediately is that the frame for the video is something like a “nonsense generator,” which will riff on nonsense until you shut it down.

Even now, I can so easily recall my bedroom at night as a child: the palpable texture of the dark, the changing shapes of shadows and the passing lights that felt supernatural. And even if a sister slept nearby, you were always alone in your fear. Fear being so powerful and yet so amorphous that we need to turn it into form in order to confront it. I think a lot about how parents try and fail or don’t try to teach us what to do with fear or oddly seem to want to acquaint us with fear. “House by the Road” is certainly concerned with that. But also how as a child, feeling unsafe can contain an element of thrill; you can almost delight in how small you are, how easily overcome, swallowed up even by the dark wave that can destroy you but will also spit you out and then who will you be?

I have nine copies of “Wing,” the 3″x 2″ letterpress edition on fabric for “Beryllium & Wing,” that I intend to send out after publication of my piece to nine close artist/writer friends and on which to collaborate. I will invite them to mar, trample, nest, or collage the little book so that these become nine other pieces in the world, investigating the kinetic page even further. See my “Statement” for ideas on “translation” relative to my multimedia work.

This story is really important to me for a number of reasons, but most specifically because of form. Here, I moved away from more traditionally shaped narratives and started working with vignettes, the style I now most often find myself cleaving to. I see, remember, and interpret the world in images, so a story like this—one told in imagistic fragments—makes much more sense to me and was more organic to craft.

I strongly encourage readers to Google Image Search “Rene and Georgette Magritte dog” to get some adorable shots of the Magrittes with Loulou, their trusty Pomeranian.

My contribution to “The Kinetic Page” is a kind of poetics statement about my collaboration Abra, with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher. Our goal was to make a book that pushes away from and beyond the notion of the single author, while also investigating the mutation of the book through history. It is a project that has many elements: a limited edition artist’s book, a free iPad and iPhone app, and a beautiful illustrated paperback published by 1913 Press. All three versions look for ways to animate language and to invite the reader to think of both the page and screen as touchable interfaces for creating their own texts.