Artist Statement
photo Diane Ransom
I am a poet. I write short form poems that examine daily experience to consider how it illuminates the lived reality of the sacred; an egg, a nuthatch, or a conversation becomes the gateway for contemplation of the ephemeral. My work is fueled by curiosity, wonder, and awe as well as grief and loss. The challenge of reconciling these human experiences stimulates my writing.
My background in theology, theatre, and women's studies infuses my work, and images from these sources are often present. I have spent much of my adult life loving and hating and coming to terms with the heritage of the biblical canon: as literature, as source of consolation, inspiration, explanation, and contention. Currently my work is inspired by the psalms found in the Hebrew Scriptures. They are hymns from the heart of life expressing praise, fear, thanksgiving, lament, expectation and more. I am not mimicking or rewriting the existing Book of Psalms; I am in conversation with them, and with the aesthetic that shaped them.
I am interested in making meaning: for human individuals and society. My writing provides readers with a way to consider these huge ideas on an intimate level through encounters with wasps, chickens, hospitals, hummingbirds, and humans. Juxtaposing memorable details of everyday experience with observations from science, politics, and theology stimulates my reader to deeper contemplation of existence and meaning.