"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 asse