Lately I’ve been writing a lot of sonnets and poems that play with the sonnet form. One of my influences is Bernadette Mayer and how she delighted in and pushed the boundaries of those fourteen lines.

My intense reading of Mayer coincided with what would become a book-length project examining my matriarchal lineage and startling patterns of domestic violence and mental illness that have been repeated through generations. At its heart, the book is an elegy for these tamped-down lives of the women in my family, and it ultimately asks, how do we learn to love? Is the way we understand love, choose our mates, and stay or leave relationships passed down like an inheritance? Because of the subject matter of the book, the sonnet became a central figure, although these are sonnets transformed, and are often dark or darkly comical, and anti-pastoral in their inclinations. Two of the sonnets here, “How to Choose a Mate” and “My Erotic Double Rides the Monorail at the Bronx Zoo”, exemplify both the humor and dark stain of love, examined through the lens of the animal world.

“Black-Fly Summer” is an example of a poem form I invented that I’m calling the ‘split sonnet’, in which the 14 th line in shared between stanzas. It is a place where the first sonnet might end and the new sonnet might also begin. As Mayer stretches the boundaries of the sonnet making some lines indented and super-long, I use that 14th line as a place to gather and push deeper, as another volta, as a place for transformation. This book-length collection is now complete — if ever a poem or manuscript is finished! I am a consummate reviser — and looking for a publisher.

My newest project, which I started in April of this year, is of erasures from The Iliad. I love this project because, like all the best creative endeavors, it was started by accident. I was asked to write a piece—possibly a lyric essay—on The Iliad for a special issue put out by Consequence Forum, a journal which examines the consequences of war. While starting to write notes for the piece, I wanted to get back into the direct language of the poem, so I decided to write some erasures as a playful exercise, pre-writing activity. And then, magically, I loved what I was creating and the project was born. I currently have about 20 erasures written and am working on more. The idea is to spend the next several months/years collaging these erasures so they are true visual poems. I’m excited to begin making visual art again, a practice I once loved to do but that I fell away from over the past busy decades of writing, child-rearing,

and teaching.

All of this is to say, my practice as a poet is continually evolving. I feel most alive when I’m writing or creating in some way. It’s also easy to fall into a rut or staleness or let anxiety overwhelm me so that the blank page is scary. The way to deal with all of these pitfalls is to find a new way in, a new way of seeing, a new way of being with language. Usually, it involves playfulness. Those are the best days.