#AWM15 live from #AWP15

I sit near baggage claim, waiting on the lovely Emily Mohn-Slate and family, grateful for wifi and to have arrived in Minneapolis. How many coats am I going to need when I step outside? What to expect from the conference?

For now, I'll just answer these questions, as part of #AWM15:

--What are your feelings about the illustration? What drives these feelings?

As I mentioned in my first blog post for #AWM15, my initial emotional response to my illustration had to do with my simultaneous feelings of disgust and awe for birds of all kinds. Their boniness. Their lack of density. The minute details of their feathers and skeletons (often seen flattened on the pavement). Their hard, splayed wings. The fact that they can fly.

Ok, so an ostrich only displays some of these characteristics, but we’re talking initial impressions here.

When I was in college, I spent some time visiting New York City on the weekends. In the courtyard to the apartment building I was staying in, there was a colony of mourning doves. I felt they were watching me at all times when I was in that apartment. I’d see them side-stepping along the windowsill and the fire escape railings. I’d see them preening. I’d hear their uncanny hollow “hoo’s,” the particular mourning-dove version of which I can recognize anywhere but can never recreate for myself out of context. They’d swoop in and out of shadows in the courtyard. They’d watch me sidewise, out of one eye. One time, I came back to the apartment to find a single gray feather resting on my pillow.

So, all of these feelings came up when I first saw the illustration. But I welcome weird discomforts such as these. Adding to this discomfort is the exciting discomfort of the rest of the image: the distortions of space and perspective that occur when the ostrich’s neck disappears into and emerges from the pyramid.

--Can you see yourself in the illustration?

I love engaging with the visceral properties of space and place. At first, I saw myself in the image simply through the things I liked about it: those expressive brown drips, the its spatial-playfulness. Now, through engaging with these questions, I can clearly see that I, myself, am this ostrich. That’s right: I preen my feathers and peck at stuff too. I stick my head not into the sand, if I can help it, but into and out of miniature pyramids, or else massive pyramids that I dwarf with my even greater massiveness, against the laws of physics and the dictates of my ostrich-instincts.

Do you find yourself in your writing too?

At first I thought to myself, “Well this is an odd question; of course I find myself in my writing…. it’s my writing!” But then, these things are never that simple, are they? The parts of myself I find in my writing are my ostrich-y parts (the plunging of my head down-down-down, not into sand, but into the warped physics of my imagination), and also the bravest parts of myself most loyal to truth. Or at least, those are the parts of myself I try to find in my poems.

Try injecting yourself into your writing and amplify the aspects of you that already exist in it.

I don’t quite know what this means. I think this is what I try to do every time I sit down and write. This amplification, or else hyper-crystallization, of my own psyche in order to create a connection with the reader. All I know is, in my poems, I am braver, weirder, meaner, kinder, smarter, and more afraid than I am in real life.