Thinking About Fire

Abstract

Most of the subject matter in my poetry overtly or covertly pertains to sexuality. My work strives to represent and explore the many facets of human desire and its consequences. In many of my poems, desire is portrayed as a difficult, on-going process locked in a state of potentiality. In the course of my graduate study, I have learned that representing the negative capability of desire demands an acute attention to the everydayness of the experience a poem represents. I have developed this attention, which authenticates experience and makes elements of artifice invisible or transparent. The development of a poetic voice has assisted me in this task. In my most successful poems (i.e."Moral," "NightMusic," "Necromimesis," "Pearl," and "Ceremony"), through an individualistic and dramatic lens of perception, the speaker becomes so lost in representing the nature of a specific experience that the product emerges with a sense of inevitability.