With a glitch. Most (maybe all?) of my poems begin with trying to think through something that resists comprehension, something that is managing to exist outside my own intellectual economy: an excess/affect/aura that can’t be accounted for in my schema. This takes a lot of different forms. I think in my earlier work I thought a lot about emotional excess, but I’ve really become more obsessed over the last few years with thinking about psychic excess. So, for example, every poem in my last book, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, takes its point of departure from a moment of sublime uncanny in a photograph by Francesca Woodman. The poem “i’m trying my hand at fashion photography” (forthcoming in The Bennington Review) takes these lines:
[…] Framesfrom this photo of Woodman’s. The engine for the poem was really just thinking through the weirdly animated quality of the empty glove, trying to figure out why it was so effective.
become us all. Lift
a limp glove with a glovved hand
to estimate the importance of a body. Everything
i say is nude
propaganda, is spiritual inseam. Spit
ash. Pin the fur to the wall. […]
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