INVOLUTION
For the past few years, I’ve been working on a collaborative project with the painter, Dana Roes, titled “Involution.” Involution is defined as the process of enfolding, inwardness, curving, ingrowth, or entangling. It is the state of being involved or complicated. Inspired by evolution, extinction, and South Florida waters, forests, and skies, this collection of art and poetry reveals the many beginnings before the one we know, the hieroglyphics of stone, secrets in fire, and the transformational power of loss. The work has finally taken shape as a full-length manuscript, and here is a clip of me reading at the gallery show at Big Arts in Sanibel in on October, 2023.
My poems are tiny, miniscule, itty bitty. My last two poems were about 200-pages long, and now I’m writing poems that average about 10 lines. There are three poems in the manuscript that are one line long. It’s interesting that such large paintings inspired these minimalist works. The essence of the paintings informed the poems, and they allowed me to create something that I have never created before.
THE NAMELESS
I just finished my third collection of poems, “The Nameless.” This book happened all at once. It was sort of magical and startling. I wrote a book-length sonnet sequence last summer (“Ivanka and the Night”), but I really wasn’t happy with it. In this collection, Ivanka Trump fell in love with the Night Sky. I worked and reworked the sonnets until they were nearly perfect. And yet, there was something missing.
Simultaneously, I had been writing another book of poems about my first love, and my pre-exorcism hallucinations. The figure of Death was a common sight then. For me, Death has always been a woman, and she took on many forms, alternately gruesome and beautiful, powerful and small. At some point I realized that I was writing the same book in two very different ways. I took the advice I so often give my students (destructive revision techniques), and combined them to form one single collection. Instead of Ivanka, it was me. The Night became Death. And so, this work is a meditation on my relationship to mortality, monstrosity, and my complicity in the destruction of human and nonhuman life.
The title of the work, “The Nameless,” is inspired by one of my favorite tarot decks, the Marseille deck, and of course my favorite card, number 13: L’Arcane sans Nom. The translates loosely as the arcanum without a name. This book is a meditation on Death as something mysterious, beyond our understanding, a thing that contains billions of names and also remains unnameable.
IVANKA FALLS IN LOVE WITH THE NIGHT
This year I’ve been collaborating with USM faculty member, dancer, and choreographer Brianna Jahn Malinowsky. We created “The Lyric Body: A Dance and Poetry Experiment” in Fall 2016. This event paired USM’s senior dancers with graduate student poets.
This spring, we’ve created an interdisciplinary performance titled “Ivanka Falls in Love With the Night.” This performance is an excerpt from a larger piece, which interrogates Ivanka Trump’s notion of “curating authenticity” by imagining her in a love affair with the primal figure of Night, an archetype for immortality. What do struggles for power mean when looked at through the lens of eternity? Can we, as beings conscious of death, ever think beyond time? And how is it that art allows us to create time, to live in it—in its rhythms, its movements, and in its shared performances?
This April, Brianna and I decided to collaborate, sending each other poems and movements each day. We decided to create a modern fairy tale. I wrote a daily sonnet, or a 14-line poem in iambic pentameter (think Shakespeare), while Brianna uploaded a dance clip of her choreography. Her movements inspired the subject matter for my poems, particularly the emphasis on spirals and triangles.
In fact, the main character of our piece evolved from a phrase that Brianna misheard during our initial meeting, exclaiming, “Did you just say Ivanka Trump?” I denied it promptly, but then Ivanka began to haunt me. There could be no other princess than America’s own first daughter. And instead of a handsome knight in shining armor, she would fall in love with the night sky.
These sorts of “mistakes” and “slippages” resulted in some unusual decisions, both in ideas and word choice. Overall, I was able to create something that I would have never made without Brianna’s thoughts and choreography. An ordinary workday for me consists of typing alone at my desk. It has been a liberating experience to leave the comfort of my house, take off my shoes, and walk on stage to witness Brianna embody the rush of the imagination and what it feels like to be a poet.
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BOOK
This memoir will explore the link between Puritanism and contemporary religious extremism. When I was fifteen, my parents claimed that my poems and stories were written by demons. As a result, they called an exorcist and burnt my work. Their response to my writing echoes early colonial beliefs about witches and possession, as those who were charged with these crimes were typically women or their relations. The title, The Indestructible Book, is inspired by a story my exorcist told me. There was a young woman whose “satanic” book could not be destroyed by ordinary means, and the book kept returning to the young girl unharmed. My exorcist said, “The witches book always returns to her,” and I’m beginning to think she was right.