"Emergent" on Soundcloud

Can a poem connect to the expansive sense of time and distance one encounters in the desert?  In composing the poems in my book, Artifact Eleven (Black Rock Press 2011), I sought a new process for engaging desert experience.  I'd always "written" "about" or "from" desert experience, in first-person pieces like "Little Disintegration" or "The Pinky of Great Sugi" (American Poetry Review 2009 and 2011, respectively).  Much as I value those pieces, I've felt a desire to find a new method that might get the poem beyond the restraint of the singular perceiver standing at the poem's center.

In Artifact Eleven, I connect a variety of source texts (Sessions Wheeler's history of the black rock desert, notes from a day trip with naturalists William Fox and Alvin McLane, John McPhee's Basin and Range, Michael Heizer's artworks and writings) with a variety of personal texts drawn from desert experiences, to create assemblages that might honor the expansiveness of western vision and temporality while retaining the preciousness of human moments.

The book is available directly from the Black Rock Press and on Amazon.com.

As part of the process of fully imagining these works, I've wanted to create audio versions of the poems that capture their immersive feel.  If all goes well, a cd of these works will be available this fall, by the time my next full-length collection, Absentia, comes out from Penguin Books.  Right now, one of these audio pieces, "Emergent," can be heard on soundcloud.

  

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