Chris Stroffolino : Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr

Ars Poeticas, Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan, 2025

How do you put the poetic aesthete in dialogue with the militant activist? Juliana Spahr shows some ways this is (im)possible in her thin volume (barely 40 pages of text) with the ambitious, definitive title: ars poetica. After a brief two-page lyric introduction called “coral,” the second of the seven ars poetica that make up this collection is the core of the book’s “argument,” a long hybrid piece, alternating between discursive lyric couplets and blocks of chatty prose, titled “scotch broom,” in which the speaker often questions her lifelong investment in poetry:

“One thought I had as we talked was love the poem but hate being the poet, hate this frayed cloth called poetry community.” (19)

“I mean, so many poems are about the not liking of poetry, and here I am writing another one. Still, it would be easy to blame my failing relationship with poetry on poetry itself. Or that is what I told them that afternoon. I knew what poetry was, what it stood for, when I first started putting words into patterns and calling it a poem. Instead, I said, I’m concerned about these other things. This nation, our nation. How it was first something terrible and now something possibly more terrible. (20)

I can definitely relate to this, but maybe that’s why I sometimes feel diffident towards ars poetica.  The jacket copy makes much of the fact that this book is inspired by Spahr’s reading of Bertolt Brecht, but for the most part it just engages one quote (perhaps the most famous) of Brecht’s, the one about writing poetry in the dark time, leaving his canon of political poems, with interventions in the material base and superstructure  (from “The Shopper” to “Everything New is Better than Everything Old”) and theatre pieces, largely untouched. Such poems, in the American canon, are often called too strident, and Brecht’s work itself is often considered too obvious to most American poets and critics trained in MFA programs, often condemned as mere agit-prop or topical rhetorical prosaic editorialzing rather than high poetry in the post-poundian 20^th century tradition. Yet not only did Brecht raise questions about the value relationship between the personal and the political in poems such as “A Bed for the Night,” he also invented new forms using accessible non-specialized language. At times, ars poetica similarly invents new forms, and widens the range of an overly narrow sense of poetry, especially poignantly in the book’s most elegiac sequence, “bison” (37-43), addressing the species extinction that is a result of the capitalist Anthropocene, or capital-cene:

                     There once was a prairie.
                     It’s never coming back,
                     as in it will never be whole again.
                     There’s the bison.
                     They can come back.
                     But the bison plus the prairie,
                     as in the bison moving over the prairie
                     with the rumored speed of a race horse,
                     that too is never coming back
                     until we change the well-intentioned
                     hopes of institutions and research,
                     the less well-intentioned grants
                     for rewilding from banks and governments,
                     into something psychotic and large
                     in its demands,
                     by which I mean the end of capitalism.

This is Spahr at her Brechtian best, but what makes it American and contemporary in this highly self-conscious age is what she writes next:

                     Really, I don’t want to land this poem so hard,
                     land it on a word so cliched as “capitalism,”
                     but I don’t know how to say otherwise
                     about the predicament we are in
                     where there is only one way out.
                     That it’s an idea that feels impossible
                     to include in a poem tells us something
                     about the new feats of imagining we
                     have yet to embrace. (43)

This is ars poetica at its Spahrian best, and I absolutely applaud her clarion call to widen the sense of poetry between stale aesthetic dictums as “no ideas but in things” and “show, don’t tell,”  but when it comes to what she offers as alternative action, an intervention that may change, or reduce, the horrors of contemporary society, she can only offer the kind of action similar to that which fellow white academic leftist Joshua Clover advocated in his book about riots. A good portion of the piece “scotch broom” is devoted to a first-person account of participating in a riot-like protest in which violence is the only currency:

“When a stick shot across the crowd, it landed at my feet. Then the kid next to me picked it up and ran back into the fight screaming, take this antifa, stick raised over the head. I saw it come down on two heads at the same time. that was all I saw because someone chasing someone else ran between us, and they sprayed bear mace, so I looked away, eyes tearing. What I mean here is that it was a time of sticks, not of poems.” (150)

Although such activity may be considered one’s civic duty, as well as offer a respite from that too often inwardly turned “poetry community” mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to read this devoid of a racial politics, and the white privilege to be violent and destructive. Often, for instance, at antifa rallies in the wake of police killings of black people, many similarly violent white protesters would come in with sticks and stones and other weapons to cause violence, even though many of the black protestors, on whose behalf the white people claimed to be fighting, warned them not to. And why? Because black people would get blamed for the violence perpetrated hy whites. As a white person, this gives me pause; there has to be another way. This makes it difficult to fully endorse Spahr’ book, even though we share many concerns, and a desire and need to intervene in the standard business as usual of the poetry “world.” A skeptic may even wonder if Spahr would have won the Pulitzer had she advocated for the kind of resistance that targets the owners of the means of production rather than poor people attacking and looting other poor people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published 9 solo collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (Blaze Vox, 2025); he’s also published a poetic collaboration with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, Periodicities published his short essays on Virginia Konchan and Rae Armantrout; poems are forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he taught at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.

Gil McElroy : even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, eds. Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin

even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin
Wesleyan University Press, 2025

 

 

 

“My vocabulary did this to me” are words absolutely synonymous with the late poet Jack Spicer, first revealed by his long-time friend, the poet Robin Blaser, in his essay “The Practice of Outside” that accompanied the book, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, published back in 1975.

An awful lot has happened since then, what with a number of more recent publications documenting both Spicer’s work and life. And those words – the last he spoke to Blaser as he lay dying in a hospital in 1965 – have escaped the gravitational pull of literary circles and spun off into the infosphere, appearing even in a newspaper crossword puzzle. Jack Spicer, it appears, has shucked off the straightjacket of being regarded merely as a poet’s poet. His legacy is larger.

Perhaps more than any other texts, letters outline the fleshly shape of a life. I’m not talking about those written with posterity in mind – in the context of a presumed literary afterlife with an audience larger than the apparent addressee – but rather letters delineating the contours (messy or not) of a life lived written with an audience of one in mind. Jack Spicer knew the trueness of letters, knew the equation, having had an early and influential encounter with Emily Dickinson’s in which he was taken with the fine line (if it exists at all) between the epistolary and the poetic in her work.

even strange ghosts can be shared collects Spicer’s wide-ranging correspondence dating back to 1943, four years before his fateful meeting with Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, and extend thru to 1965, a month before he died – with an add-on of selected letters sent to him from (amongst others) Duncan, Blaser, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Some of this has been published previously, but this is the first time his extensive correspondence has been collected. It makes for a fascinating, albeit upsetting, map.

Now, the letter recipient may be a singular audience, but it’s clearly evident that Spicer is performing. Clever Jack is everywhere. He makes evident attempts to be outrageous, pushing the envelope with humour and wit. But it’s a private performance. Not designed for the ages or the masses, but for the singularity of that privileged person on the other end. Alas, in the last few years of his life those letters often took an ugly turn and manifested harshness and vitriol and meanness.

And worse.

Like any letters written without an eye towards posterity, Spicer’s run the gamut from the mundane to the miraculous. Of the former, maybe the strangest might be the resume he sent in 1958 to San Quentin State prison applying for a teaching position there. And in case we thought (as did I) that his use of the term “Martians” was one he employed only to help describe his poetics in his later lectures, in fact he uses it often in writing to friends. In a 1954 letter to longtime friend Graham Mackintosh who’d been drafted into the military, for instance, Clever Jack writes that “MARTIANS DEMAND RELEASE MACKINTOSH,” and then a week later “EISENHOWER DENIES MARTIAN CHARGES IN MACKINTOSH CASE”. And even deep and intense relationships sometimes show pique, as in Spicer’s annoyance with Blaser in a 1951 letter written during the former’s short and unhappy tenure in Minneapolis, in which he addresses Blaser as “Dear Stinker,” and signs off with “unlove”. Pushing.

And then into the ugly. Spicer’s move back to San Francisco in 1956 where he lived until his death in 1965 marks a massive change in tone and texture. Anger, intolerance, jealousy and bigotry rise up suddenly and unexpectedly in his letters of this period, like flares shooting up, brightly burning in some night sky. Afterimages linger, altering how we experience the large landscape of his correspondence. Spicer’s story falters by the wayside, weighed heavily with the burden of malevolence. And this just as his work was starting to be registered in a larger than local way.

Daniel Benjamin addresses this directly in his introductory essay, suggesting in the end that “we might contextualize Spicer’s violent remarks in his attempt to understand his own status as an outsider following his political involvement with the Mattachine Society, an early gay activist organization….” But how does that affect our reading of his work?  We judge Wallace Stevens and Pound (amongst so many others) on their racism and anti-semitism as inseperable from their work. Spicer most certainly cannot be absolved; his violence goes beyond mere crankiness. A 1959 letter to Robert Duncan regarding City Lights Bookstore is sickeningly racist. So much for the mythology of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. Of course, Spicer was but just one part of it, but were poetry judged by the same strictures as baseball, the game that he loved above all, maybe there should be an asterisk next to his name.

“What I need most, of course, is for someone to astonish me,” he writes in a letter to Robin Blaser in 1956. “Poetry only happens, I think, when people astonish each other.”

True, I do find myself astonished now, though not as Spicer might have hoped I would be. It pushes aside my earlier and better astonishment over his work. Now, though, I find myself mourning the Spicer that gave me that. Benjamin’s essay notes the ‘different’ Jacks that have accreted around him: “Real Jack,” “Radiant Jack,” ‘Dirty Jack,” and so I clearly realize which one I miss and admire. I want my real astonishment back.

Warts and all, the multiplicity that was Jack Spicer has been laid bare for the rest of us to know. I’ve not read Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and what little I’ve known about the man (as opposed to the work) began 40 years ago with Ekbert Faas’s Young Robert Duncan.  A way of saying much of this is new information (for me), new contexts (for me). Let these letters, valuable and useful as they are, not be the last word on Spicer. One thing is very apparent, though: his vocabulary did this to him.

 

 

 

 

Gil McElroy is a poet, visual arts curator, and critic. His most recent book is Long Division (University of Calgary Press, 2020). He's currently working on a book about the Windsor-based 'five-and-dime' architect G.A. McElroy, his grandfather. He currently lives in North Bay, Ontario.

rob mclennan : Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr

Ars Poeticas, Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press, 2025

 

 

 

The latest from American poet Juliana Spahr is Ars Poeticas, a self-described collection of “lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism,” exploring how to write in and through and around the current ecological and political climate. Across numerous collections over thirty years—including That Winter The Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), When Then There Now (Black Sparrow Press, 2011), This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (Palm Press, 2003), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism (Explosive Books, 1998), Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996) and Nuclear (Leave Books, 1994), as well as a handful of fiction and critical titles—Spahr has engaged structures of repetition and accumulation, offering rhythmic loops and repeated movements across the lyric. As the first piece, “ARS POETICA 1,” a two-page extended poem subtitled “coral,” begins: “To write poetry after Castle Bravo. / Then to write poetry after 1,500 feet. / After high-quality steel frame buildings, / not completely collapsed, except / all panels and roofs blown in. / After 2,000 feet. / After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed, / or standing but badly damaged. / After 3,500 feet. / After church buildings completely destroyed. / After brick walls severely cracked. / After 4,400 feet. / After 5,300 feet. / After roof tiles bubbled and melted. / After 6,500 feet.” As with the other pieces in this collection, this opening poem moves slow, incrementally building, moving from a set of simple thoughts into such wonderful complexity. “To write poetry in the blue / that is the absence of green.”

Ars Poeticas is constructed out of seven numbered and themselves accumulated sections of “ARS POETICA,” with subtitles “coral,” “scotch broom,” “bluebird-ghost,” “bison,” “goby,” “coral, again” and “acknowledgments,” through which Spahr questions the purpose of poetry through poetry. “For years I loved for what was // poetry.” the second poem offers, “I used poetry to shimmy / in, during these years, to build the compounded // patterns of song, even if I recognized / poetry’s verses as songs that tend toward // institutional. I though that poetry / could be apart from the nation still.” Further on in her eight page poem, couplet set upon couplet, as she writes: “I lived not just for the reading but for that / moment after the reading too.” There is the way she articulates how she landed at poetry, explored and engaged the form as reader, moving slowly into engagements as writer and critic as well, articulating her lyric with the world, and into a conclusion that the world is not separate from literature, even if we wish it to be. “A poem,” she writes, “I understood. Just as one day / I looked inside a lily, Catalina // Mariposa Lily. One day I said, oh // there is an entire world in the throat, a high- // contrast zone, as they say, and it was so like / walking out into a field at night and there// looking up at the stars.” Even if we want the world to be separate, at certain times, it isn’t possible, nor should it be. Spahr’s Ars Poeticas offer insight into a conversation on and through the paths lyric pushes us to highlight, both light and dark, and how one might best move through it, even across the failures art provides. Can or should art, specifically poetry, save us? Is that even possible? In the end, Spahr’s lyric might just be about survival. If we are willing to work for it, of course.

The reasons why there are thousands of representations
of buffalo hunts in state museums
and none of a bison on its back making the wallow
probably have to do with how Buffalo Bill Cody killed
over four thousand in eighteen months.
He shot sixty-eight in an eight-hour period.
The railroad and the gun.
There is human ingenuity again, failing us.
And here is human ingenuity
trying to pick up the pieces,
hundreds of years later.
Still, that Remington.
It is hard not to think there is art again, failing us. (“ARS POETICA 4, bison”)

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is behind on more things than can be dreamt of in your philosophy. His latest poetry title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). Later this year sees the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).

 

 

Chris Stroffolino : Thoughts occasioned by Rae Armantrout’s “Traffic”

 

 

The trees, good seraphim,
begin to sing

at dawn
about making sugar

out of light
and the happy traffic

between high and low—
as if that were all

~

I expect compensation
for all I don’t
say—

for each time I stop
before coming

to an obvious conclusion
or an uncertain end---

for my discretion.

~

(Music needs silence
more than silence needs music.)

(Wobble, 2018, page 96)

~~~

To start with the parenthetical envoi that seems to end the poem:

(Music needs silence
more than silence needs music.)

When I read this in 2019, it inspired me to write:

“a video needs a soundtrack
more than music needs a video.”

Rereading it five years later, I’m more interested in its function in her poem “Traffic.” In a way, it could tell us how to read the rest of the poem, and help us make sense of the contrast between the first 8-lined section, which uses the word “Sing” (if not the word music), and the second 8-lined section which uses the enjambed phrase, “don’t/ say” (if not the word silence).

The first section may evoke a pantheistic joyous aeolian harp metamorphosing photosynthetic inter-relatedness. One may even feel the “Happy traffic” as the music of the spheres in hubcaps circling counter clockwise on a cruising car in L.A.---but the limits of such music (not necessarily “upper limit”) come through in the phrase “as if that were all,” if we take the “as if” in its negative sense, while not exactly ruling out the possibility that it could be all.

The implicit entrance of the speaker as commentator sets up the second section, and can build an expectation that this second section will tell, or show, us, what the “happy traffic” ignores, or excludes. Both sections can be read as single sentences. Notably, the first section isn’t punctuated but left hanging after its final word, “all,” while the second has a period after the word discretion. While the “subject” of the first section is plural third-person trees as divine instruments, the subject of the second section is a singular lyric “I.” The trees don’t appear in the second section, and the “I” is only implied in the first section’s final line.

In contrast to the trees, the “I” is concerned with the ethics of utterance, and expects compensation for its discretion. Compensation from who? Or from what? It could be read as a prayer, an invocation to a muse. The violation of couplet form in the first stanza, leaving the word “say” on its own line could complicate what seemed a straightforward statement on first reading:

I expect compensation
for all I don’t
say—

It’s possible the first couplet could be read as its own unit; the speaker is expecting compensation for all it doesn’t do. The line break could serve as an imagined comma, and “say” can be read as “for example.”  As Armantrout dramatizes line breaks calling attention to themselves (in ways that remind me of Creeley & Dickinson) to slow attention, she places the words saying and doing into question:

for each time I stop
before coming

to an obvious conclusion
or an uncertain end---

The longer I look, the more possible meanings and tones can emerge. Does the “I” stopping prevent it from coming to an obvious conclusion or an uncertain end, or does the stopping enable such coming? Is the “I” a personification of silence?

In the context of the entire poem, these two couplets can be read as examples of her not saying. The em-dashes that frame it can also serve as an open parenthetical, in contrast to the closed parenthetical of the envoi. In this light, the parenthetical envoi can thus be read as both/neither an obvious conclusion and an uncertain end. The authority of the statement may be obvious, but the parenthesis brings enough uncertainty in to make it live, as if, almost despite the claims of the parenthetical envoi, the poem enacts music and silence mutually making love to each other that the trees are merely singing “about,” as if this discrete poem compensates for what its discreet meanings expect.

After all, it wasn’t that the trees’ song was really making sugar out of light, they were just singing about it. Just because they’re singing about it, doesn’t mean they’re doing it, at least to the skeptical listener, who may suspect that trying to write “about” music is the least musical form of writing.

In Armantrout’s poem, this second section is no mere comedown (like the end of Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp”); no mere song of experience criticizing the “too happy trees” to contrast with the first section’s song of innocence, it shows more (and therefore less) than it says (and doesn’t).

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published 6 books of poetry, most of which are out of print (including Speculative Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter (1997). Most recently Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once Wore, (Crisis Chronicles, 2018), a new and selected. A book of quasi-theoretical prose reminiscences, Death of a Selfish Altruist was published by Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012. He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG Books, 2001). Forthcoming in 2024 or 2025 is In The Here There, a collection of essays about and interviews with (mostly) contemporary poets from 2015 to 2024 (Spuyten Duyvil), a sequel to Spin Cycle, a collection of essays from the 1990s Spuyten Duyvil published in 2001.

He has taught Critical Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since 2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway. He has released 4 albums of songs under his own name, including Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions (2014), and “12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello.” (2019). Recent poetry has appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, and Fence. He is currently seeking a publisher for Medi(t)ations, his first full length book of new poetry since 2005.

Benjamin Friedlander : Notice, by Rae Armantrout

Notice, Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

Coordinated by a sensibility attuned to but not beholden to bewilderment, Rae Armantrout’s poetry has always been a facing up to reality. More than any other poet I can think of, she treats intelligence as necessary but insufficient to the task—in essence the task of living. What she makes of insufficiency shapes the foreground of her work. The results, however, aren’t bleak. Detachment and good humor predominate, highlighting the comic qualities of bewilderment. Its whys and wherefores are pushed to the background, as they are in life. 

Armantrout’s materials and scenarios are diverse, yielding in their totality a picture of the world—a world we inherit and collectively maintain. Notice sharpens the picture by focusing on climate change, bringing together fifteen poems from previous collections. Apparently, climate change has been a concern of hers all along, but blended with other concerns; it was easy not to notice. Rereading the work in this concentrated form flips our perspective. We find ourselves more attentive than usual to the background: not just Armantrout’s guiding intelligence—we’re always at least dimly aware of that—but also the ethical dimensions of her focus on bewilderment. Detachment and good humor are backlit here by insistence and dread. Her poems always provoke questions, but those are usually local matters of interpretation. Here, the questions are global. How live in this world? How safeguard its future? How care for life’s foreground and background at the same time? How attend honestly to failure without losing touch with the need to go on? Good things to be asking in 2024.

 

 

 

Benjamin Friedlander is a poet, scholar, and editor. His newest book of poetry is Some Cares, forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. With Alison Fraser, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman he recently edited Nice: The Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat, 2024). Since 1999 he has taught American literature and poetics at the University of Maine, where he edits the scholarly journal Paideuma.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Ed Roberson

Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson
Wesleyan University Press, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Ed Roberson, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a contemporary poet interested in the environment, visuality, and spirituality. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including MPH + Other Road Poems (2021), the chapbook Closest Pronunciation (2013), To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010), which was a runner up for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Award, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009), City Eclogue (2006), and Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University.

I’m curious about the way you structure poems, each of which seem to expand out of a single, opening point, usually articulated through your use of titles. What brought you to where you are now, of composing poems as such forms of inquiry, opening and engagement?

I see form as information, structure as information about what it encompasses, an argument; then I see balance as a form of answer.

I first thought of poems as a different way of seeing that enlarged our seeing in ways simpler language couldn’t. Now I’ve begun to see the forms and structures of poetry not just as a way of seeing, or as a discourse in/on a different level, but as a way of discovery, of inquiry, as a way of solving questions or problems. So the ABA form; or the strophe, antistrophe, epode; or the octet, volta, and sestet all come to be methodologies of music, of imageries, of poetry right now.

The way this collection is structured suggests poems that sit together less through an array of narrative propulsion or through-line than as a suite of poems that flow across a broader canvas, allowing for the ebb and flow of subject and lyric. How do your poetry manuscripts, then, form themselves? Have you a particular series of subjects or structures you wish to engage, or do books form more organically?

There is no typical way in which my manuscripts are formed other than the pile in which the poems collect on my desk. My writing style is similarly unorganized—or, rather to say, organic. I write on anything: newspaper or magazine blank spaces, the tear-off section of bills and renewal forms, packaging—anything. I write with anything—ink, pencil—and only later put the writing into the computer. I continue refining the compositions for rhythmical timing (by line and by spacing, open and vertical), for graphic image and form (by line count, repetition, and stanzaic structure), and for music (by reading aloud). Then a final typed copy is made, saving all the revisions. This can take a day or several weeks. I work on several ideas/poems simultaneously.

Are there particular pieces composed through this system that might not fit into the manuscript you are currently working on, but might land in something else down the line? I suppose this question leans into wondering if you compose multiple manuscript-threads simultaneously.

I learned to draw from my dad, who would draw what he was going to build as a way of understanding what he was about to do as much as envisioning his finished box, cabinet, or room extension on the house. I take seeing as a way of explaining or understanding from him. My understanding, and love, of poetry took off like a slingshot when I discovered images and what different figurations could do. My work is visual, yes, but not simply descriptive.

I’m curious to read that you studied painting in your youth. I’m wondering how your engagement in visual art might have informed the structure of how you approach or construct poems?

I seem interested in the language of vision, the rhythms and conceptualizations that go on when seeing and the transformations that occur. So images that talk back and forth, take stands (masks) and work it out or not, is what impels my poems. Hence, the serial poem and its choral, community format. Any image or visual statement can set off a poem, so I’m always open to a poem, but what pile, what discussion, i.e., what manuscript it will join is up to the mind of the group. Yes, multiple threads because I’m always watching, looking at multiple things in a changing world from fluctuating engaged viewpoints.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since asked what has changed was completed? What have you been working on since?

I’m writing a lot of art reviews, criticism, which seems in line with the poems’ review and criticism of seeing, of perception and knowledge. I like the way a figure or an image in a poem can line out the knowledge within something while also drawing out the emotional encompass of its mystery.