Artist's Statement

Formally, I am interested in the poem as a visual, auditory, and experiential field. I think of field, what I think of is the Greek word aporia – meaning impasse, lack of resources, and puzzlement. I am drawn to the inherently energetic and physical nature of the impasse, by the conflation of time and space that often characterizes our most inner and deeply felt experiences, and ultimately by what happens when the mind is puzzled. For me, the poem, at its strongest, is the record of an experience – most specifically, the experience of the mind grappling. As a compositional strategy, the notion of the page-as-field allows me to understand and deploy language in a very physical and concrete way. 

Thematically, my most recent body of work explores facets of remorse, loss, and leave-taking. I am especially interested in unearthing the generational, inherited legacies we embody – often unspoken, unconscious, and therefore difficult to name. In particular, these poems bear traces of my Irish family’s experiences of famine, illness, leave-taking, and their aftermath. 

Initially part of my compositional process, I have come to understand these artifacts as objects in their own right, records of an intuitive, manual re-working of text – part of myc physical thinking process. For me, their highest value (and ultimately their beauty) lies in making tangible/audible the intuitive logic at work in the text.