Radical Two

Reading Edward Tufte changed my approach to poetry layout. The eyes track objects in saccades which are spasmodic bursts of movement. Tufte taught me to arrange open form poetry so that there could be multiple paths of reading.

During this book I began to make visual art and study set theory, symbolic logic, and computability.

“Din & Sit: Cuts of Phi on Sein und Zeit” is a poetic transformation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It is lineated according to the phi ratio and filtered through the work of Emily Dickinson.

Noah Heringman of the band The Hellbenders set one section of Din & Sit to music and recorded it on their album Stone Cold.

“Ant Traps” is a serial poem imagined as a series of short films. It first appeared in the New Orleans Review and can be accessed in the PDF of that issue.

One thing I learned from visual artists is that material at hand can prompt new work. I finished producing a poetry show and had extra post cards I had employed. I wrote a poem on each and arranged them on a wall. I called the piece “Missouri in Two Dimensions: An Installation.” The magazine 9th Letter published the installation as a pullout map. Below is a proof of that map.

During this time I was part of an education delegation to China. During that three week trip I wrote a poem-a-day. In Changsha I talked all day with a scholar who was writing her dissertation on Wallace Stevens. She kept asking of his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “What is the order?” That night I wrote a poem in the style of Stevens as a response. It was published in the Wallace Stevens Review.(The entirety of the poem appears in the abstract).

The Idea of Order in Changsha, China