(See also: 22 reasons I make collage poems)

I've always had a need to feel grounded, rooted, connected. I love the idea of imitation--and how imitation was understood before the modern era as a wonderful thing. Now we have to act like it doesn't happen. My work is apart of the longing to imitate.

I also like to think strategically--I enjoy making connections across disparate bodies of knowledge. I like to break things apart and then mend them--break--mend--break--mend.

Much of my poetry prior to this has had a similar need to be ecstatic and scattered--a voice that is attempting to express deep emotion through some invisible constraint.

I want work that is both playful & literary. I love when work is moving on multiple levels at once--the more levels of connection the better. Collage poetry provides more layers of possible self-reference.

I love systems, processes--when the outcome is unpredictable. I want a method I can manipulate but never dictate.

You can plan, plan, plan but at the moment of action you have to give up, adapt, head in a new direction, follow wherever the river takes you. (See Lewis & Clark)

I wanted to do something difficult--a built-in difficulty. For me difficulty is proof of work.

I have had existential worries since I read Sartre and Kierkegaard in high school. This work is about that fear.

The desire to escape the Word Document, the blue-lined notebook page, to work on larger, larger paper (I generally do all my writing now on a very large sketchpad)--all that is an Abstract Expressionist impulse, I believe. I have a need to write BIG (-sized) poems...

...the loss of self-consciousness. Intuition, at play among the materials--I've always wanted that. Also, to be physical, to be active, to make art standing up, to be alert to my surroundings... You see, I never played many sports growing up because I hated competition. It so often ended with someone feeling bad or with people depending on me and me letting them down. For a long time I've been looking for some way to make writing like a sport, to make it fully active, tactile, to require my body and my senses.

As early as I can remember I made things in my bedroom, typically alone--watercolors, board games, short stories, shadow boxes, little environments. I think in my bedroom alone, working with very simple materials, is a very happy place for me.

Someone might say that I collage out of fear of writing my own material. I've written my own material--I'm already tired of myself.

The Trinity, becoming one with the Father, Jesus seen in the face of a stranger... all this is a pseudo-theological justification for something rather mundane that requires no justification (and it sounds kind of overblown anyway).

I've always felt very empathetic towards people. I imagine what it's like to be any stranger I see. Perhaps it started as a game and then became something more. But my whole family is very sensitive to people--all more compassionate than me. I've tried to suppress my own and have also used it very selfishly, especially as I've grown older. Anyway, being inside someone else's words seems very natural to me. I don't really imagine myself as the original author but the idea that we might share something together, that our voices might permeate one another, feels very wholesome to me.