How does poetry inform your work with Wormfarm and vice versa?
My poems are specific to place. So far that’s meant the Atlantic coastal areas of eastern North Carolina and Provincetown, Massachusetts, threaded through with time in New Orleans and St. Louis: the Mississippi River. It’s taken me a while to write here in Sauk County because it’s taken time to understand where I am, why and for how long. This is my third year as director of programs at Wormfarm and I’m beginning to feel some ground underneath me. The institute’s work with artists, farmers, conservationists, and rural and urban collaborators affects how I think about a total Ecology, both its physical and psychic parts, and I trust that’s shaping my poems’ futures for the better.
And what other influences, circumstances or inspirations help shape your work?
Religion, mythology, ritual magic, Tarot, astrology, TV, Yoga, the fantastic reaches of the imagination to create meaning and tell stories about our place here. How to plug in, draw power, heal and extend one’s lineage with all its nuances. How to belong, dwell in an aligned place of power, call the names of God. Bhanu Kapil, Dana Levin, Ann Hamilton, Hart Crane, Anne Waldman, Thylias Moss, Amanda Ackerman, CAConrad, Jean Valentine. Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object). Being a body in a world.
