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Name:
Hometown: I grew up in
Education: Bachelor of Arts, English
--Current projects and publications:
Waterlogged August
I gladly dropped everything for this!
--Past projects and publications:
I still occasionally work on a series of modern response poems to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Tender Densities: A Collection of Poems, 2004
Stolen Island Review, 2005 contributor
Please Welcome, 2004 contributor
The Maine Review, 2003/2004 contributor; 2004/2005 editor and contributor
Hemlock, 2003/2004 contributor; 2004/2005 editor and contributor
I’ve been writing since I could. I started writing short stories in third grade and illustrating them myself. Being an only child had a huge influence on my drive to write. My imagination was my playground—and what it created fascinated me.
2) What do you primarily write? (Fiction, Non-fiction, poetry, prose, sci-fi, horror, post-modern, etc) Why and how does that certain genre speak to you/draw you in? How does your work tie in to your everyday life?
I write poetry, exclusively, though I’ve been working on a prose poem since 1999. I think it’s almost done.
Poetry speaks to me because it is the only time when you can take everything you’ve been taught about language and turn it upside down—you can manipulate all rules. While I enjoy structure and order as much as the next person, I cannot have it in my poetry—unless the poem wants it there. I want no restrictions and no limitations.
My ‘work’ is (and always has been) an escape from my everyday life. It is the place where I shut everything out and tune in to what my subconscious wants to say—really.
3) Which writers would you consider to be your influences?
Robert Creeley was the most influential; John Wieners and Sylvia Plath are there also. Chuck Palahniuk and J.D. Salinger, too.
Lately my biggest influence has been Jeff Clark, hands down. I highly recommend his books Music & Suicide and The Little Door Slides Back.
4) Tell us a little bit about your writing. What makes it special and unique? Why do you write? What subject matter strikes you as particularly inspiring? Particularly difficult?
I write because I must. Sometimes I just hear the words and I can’t do anything else until I’ve written them down. I think what makes my writing unique would be the way in which I play with sound and meaning. Some poets choose to concentrate on one or the other, sometimes, but I feel that both have equal place of importance in the poem. I try to balance them out so that each has equal footing; equal importance and impact. They are in competition with one another at all times.
I have a difficult time trying to write about anything other than personal relationships. For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever written a “political” poem.
5) In what ways has your writing evolved over the course of your writing career?
Well, as I said earlier, I started out writing fiction. I didn’t begin to write poetry until early high school. One of my teachers recognized I had an ear for sound and an eye for the line and enrolled me in a gifted and talented writing program. In college I made a brief return to fiction but it never stopped feeling awkward to me, so I gave it up entirely. It was when I started writing poetry seriously that I sort of became myself, suddenly. I was hooked.
Once I started work shopping in college, it became imperative that I pay more attention to sounds in my poetry. It became increasingly important when I was meeting regularly with a writers’ group and reading my poems aloud on a weekly basis.
More recently, I’ve tried to remove myself from the poem. I’ve wanted to move away from letting the “I” act as the central figure in the poem and experiment with what could stand in its place.
6) What's in store for the future of your writing?
Finishing my prose poem and then perhaps self-publishing a short book of poems.
7) What are you reading right now?
Cunt-Ups by Dodie Bellamy. She’s fabulous.
8) If you could live your life in any fictional setting from a book or poem, which book or poem would you choose?
This is a great question!
It would have to be in Jeff Clark’s poem “Teheran” because it’s written in the style of an insanely curious and bizarre dream. It’s so much fun to read and I feel like I’m there when I’m reading it. Each time something new enters the poem/dream, I laugh because it makes so much sense no matter how wacky it is. Plus it starts in medias res —I love that.
9) Tell us about your experience with the Waterlogged August collaboration. What was enjoyable about it? What was difficult? What would you do differently if you had it all to do over again? What was your favorite photo/piece of writing?
Mostly I approached it wincing. Now that it’s over, I couldn’t be happier with the final product. There was a point when Landon and I were really syncing and it was such a trip.
Once we got going, everything fell into place so naturally.
I’ll admit it was difficult to write about “strangers” when my counterpart primarily photographs landscapes. But in thinking about the way landscape is tied to memory, the poems kind of shaped themselves in a way that allowed each photo’s setting, each landscape, to tell its story.
What would I do differently? Well, I probably would have tried to align my writing more with our assigned theme: strangers. But, I can’t argue with what wants to be written.
My favorite photo was “Digging Your Front Door” because it’s such a striking yet soft moment, captured. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The photo that Landon named to match my poem “How Small” was a close second. The perspective is so interesting.
My favorite poem was “everything is a parked car, or leaving” because I love the way it ends—I feel it might be one of the strongest, tightest endings I’ve ever written.