Like Begetting (Original writing, Poetry)

Like Begetting is situated in the American imagistic and contemplative tradition of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Lorine Niedecker, and John Ashbery. Like other poetry in this aesthetic lineage, my work tends toward lyric meditation rather than narrative autobiography, although the poems do share a recurrent guiding voice. Some poems explore tangible experiences such as working in a bar or gardening. The majority, however, explore less tangible phenomena. As Keats put it, they "dwell in uncertainties" (2048).; The poems demonstrate a doubled impulse toward orientation and disorientation. Their physical settings provide a stability often destabilized by the interjection of a narrative voice and an ensuing dialogue between the imaginative modes of description and cognition. My work aims to chart novel ontologies and complex states of being. In creating these poetic sites, I write to discover how to know and to discover what can't be discovered, to question and to accommodate imaginative human potential.