Artist's Statement

Formally, poems for me are a visual, auditory, and experiential field. What engages me both aesthetically and emotionally is the nature of the impasse, the conflation of time and space that characterizes our most inner and deeply felt experiences. What happens when the mind is puzzled? How do we account for such puzzlement on the page? I like to think about the poem as a way to record, or trace, the sound and movement of the mind grappling. As a compositional strategy, the notion of the page-as-field allows me to deploy language in a visual way. My long poems in particular make use of white space in ways that more closely approximate the way the mind works, making visual and auditory connections that would not otherwise occur to me.

In both composition and revision, I am most interested in exploring material that feels elusive – that continues to baffle. Manual work – handwork, creating what I call artifacts allow me to work with the parts of my own material I don’t yet understand and allow them to become doorways to an awareness richer and more surprising than I’d suspected. Indeed, what mystifies us in our work often turns out to be a threshold to “the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.” The body – storehouse of memories – is a door, a threshold, through which we enter more deeply into the logic of our intuition and associative leaps. Manual work helps to unearth the intuitive logic already at work in the material.  

I want to talk about the poem as a record of an experience – specifically, an experience of the field.  Of what happens when one arrives in the field and encounters the aporia – Greek for impasse, difficulty of passing, lack of resources, puzzlement. The white space.  Silence. What is the visual equivalent of silence – invisibility? Or stillness.  

The field is not naturally occurring; it is human-made, carved out of woodland, of what is wild, what is naturally given.  Its purpose is to yield up something life-sustaining like crops, fodder, or animals.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram explores the sensual foundations of language, its rootedness in the calls and cries of the non-human world, in order to reveal the dependence of human cognition on the natural environment:  “It is exceedingly difficult for us literates to experience anything approaching the vividness and intensity with which surrounding nature spontaneously presents itself to the members of an indigenous, oral community” (p. 124).  We think with and through the body. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty said as much.  

To walk through the field of a poem is to re-enact, or at least to participate in, the original thinking process of the writer. To walk through the field of one’s own poem is to think – to make available more of the world, shepherding into our own experience that which had been previously invisible and inaudible.  

 It is not too much of a leap, I think, to go from the field to the blank page, where there is nothing until it becomes, through the work of the writer or book artist, inhabited with text and maybe images. It is where thinking has happened, and what is left there for us to experience is the record of that happening. Is this the transfer of energy by way of the poem that Charles Olson meant in his 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse”?  How does such a transfer of energy happen, unless we understand that the page as field – as a real field where work happens – is where the energetic movement of mind (and of body) is left intact, recorded and potential. Traceable.