I was fortunate to contribute to Bunkong Tuon’s on going series “Poets on Craft” and to be paired with the always hip John Dorsey.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that as an English Professor, I like to have a prompt for my poetry. I’m not great at spontaneously inventing from a blank page; I need to be in conversation with an idea for a while in my daily life, and then start transcribing that conversation into poetry. For example, my latest project is a collection of poetry about human relationships with animals and what the behavior of animals reveals to us. This could be on the micro level of my own personal relationships with pets and the natural world and what this might say about me, or on the macro level of how our culture treats animals and what this says about being human. Having a prompt in my head creates a lens through which I look at the world, and I become attentive to how my experience with animals could be better understood through poetry.

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