Artist's Statement
Both my poetry and academic writing deal with themes that the National Park Service promotes: an awareness of the natural world and artistic and literary engagement with observed and felt ecologies. I am interested in being part of the archival impulse, at the heart of the NPS Artist-in-Residence program, to document the aesthetic impulse which is a part of our collective and individual response to encounters in our environments. Many of my poems finds roots in the labor of science and the daily observations of people closely aligned with the environment (farmers, gardeners, fisherman, and the sometimes more abstract land-watchers). Other poems consider the lives of animals and plants in the Romantic tradition: by reflecting our own minds onto objects in the world and allowing that light to bend around the material of the natural world, we often discover new ways of seeing. My poems are often referred to as having a documentary style because I like to mix direct records: language fragments, signage, and even scientific papers with stylized imagery from the natural world. My poetry writing method involves observations of people and landscapes and note-taking about particular scientific processes. I often make photographs for reference, though I do not typically treat them in an ekphrastic manner. Instead, I work from memory and impressions of the natural world.
Both my poetry and academic writing deal with themes that the National Park Service promotes: an awareness of the natural world and artistic and literary engagement with observed and felt ecologies. I am interested in being part of the archival impulse, at the heart of the NPS Artist-in-Residence program, to document the aesthetic impulse which is a part of our collective and individual response to encounters in our environments. Many of my poems finds roots in the labor of science and the daily observations of people closely aligned with the environment (farmers, gardeners, fisherman, and the sometimes more abstract land-watchers). Other poems consider the lives of animals and plants in the Romantic tradition: by reflecting our own minds onto objects in the world and allowing that light to bend around the material of the natural world, we often discover new ways of seeing. My poems are often referred to as having a documentary style because I like to mix direct records: language fragments, signage, and even scientific papers with stylized imagery from the natural world. My poetry writing method involves observations of people and landscapes and note-taking about particular scientific processes. I often make photographs for reference, though I do not typically treat them in an ekphrastic manner. Instead, I work from memory and impressions of the natural world.