Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My poetry is often polyvocal and playful, seeking to draw its critical concerns as well as its elegiac inclinations into a field of sociality. In my writing, everyday life and the imagination mingle: coordinating with, countering, and/or performing something other to the social logics that seek to contain and limit thought and behaviors. Questions of gender are at the center of my experimentation with language, syntax, the poetic line, and the sentence as a poetic unit. In addition to collections of poetry and essays, I have published and produced a number of plays for poet’s theater, which extend my linguistic experimentation to collective non-hierarchical interpretation of written language in performance. Improvised music has affected how I listen to and hear language and draw from the sensory world. In the last two decades this has led to frequent transpositions of text-based composition into verbal scores for music/text collaboration.

While at Headlands

The pieces I will be working on during my residency are composed in “real time.” These are long poems that fold temporalities and sensorial information of the moment into their durational forms. Aspects of “real time” I will be attuned to in the completion of the poem-dialogue series “Scales for the Living” includes natural cycles and ocean surrounds of the Headlands, the ebb and flow of everyday experience, the currents of the ruptured and rupturing political sphere, and the traces of pandemic ambience. I will also be working on a long poem written in improvised couplets, “Against Interpretation of the Heartland” and a music/text performance that will include sections from “Scales for the Living,” to take place at the LAB in San Francisco following my residency.