The first thing that strikes me when I read your poetry – for example, the marvelous pieces at Talking Writing and Radius – is how intricately connected to nature they are, weaving in elements from the Northern California landscape, following its cycles of decay and renewal. How important is the place you live to the way you write?
Place is a central part of my writing process. I am fortunate to have grown up in Sonoma County in Northern California. And I live and write on the same property where I grew up, so my natural surroundings are something I’ve been learning about since I was eight or nine and set off on day-long creek exploring adventures. The hawks raise their young in the same tall pines above my home as they did when I was a child. The quail nest in the same spot next to our gravel driveway each year. The deer follow the same paths year after year. I have a visceral love of this place and I guess I never get tired of trying to understand where I am. These days I’m equally focused on digging into the recorded history of the place where I live too.
I do a lot of work centered around Web development, so of course I was particularly drawn to the series of “code” poems (incorporating elements of HTML, XML, PERL and javascript) that you wrote for Raft. What attracted you to experimenting with these syntaxes, and what possibilities do you think they offer up for poets interested in exploring new forms?
Well, I’ve spent the past fourteen years as a web developer and social media communications consultant. For most of my career as a web developer I kept my poetry life separate. But something happened to me once I had children, and I just couldn’t believe in boundaries between my writing life, my work life, and my home life anymore. One day I was trying to write an elegy for a friend’s father and I just couldn’t break the lyric enough to express what I wanted to say. Then, I remembered how malleable XML code was and thought, “why couldn’t I frame my lyric thoughts in tags?” It was really empowering to blend the language of poetry with the language of code. It was especially fun to bring in the Perl tags. I hate Perl. Every application I had to build and support at one of my old jobs was built in clunky Perl code that I never felt I could control. It was so liberating to use Perl poetically rather than functionally.
