Although we often think of words that describe people, places, and things, I have tried to create poems in which the words themselves are central and can be seen as objects in themselves. For me, each word has a particular weight, color, and emotion that no other word possesses. In my poetry, I have tried to put words together in a fashion that is both musical and painterly. My poems are part sound machines, part riddles, and part verbal collage. They resemble surreal objects and Picabia—like twittering contraptions that attempt to get at the structure of language itself. They mean to please and charm by playing with our sense of expectation and meaning.
In so doing, the poems also tell a story about how we use language and how we put words together to please ourselves and others.
The idea is to create a pamphlet that would be part book, part map, part record of a walk taken through the park, and part visual drawing with words rubbed in or written in. It would tell a story of each person’s visit to the Cleveland Public Library, and each record would be different. The idea is to give visitors something lasting that they can take away from their visit, something that they took part in writing as well as in reading. And what they read helped them map the space they walked through, and that walking tour, in turn, helped to write a poem that completed the pamphlet. So the person leaving the library would have walked through a landscape, read some words, and created a poem. In this sense, the pamphlet is meant to work with the sculptural installation, creating a hybrid or interactive text. And it is meant to suggest that writing and reading is something that’s fun and that everyone can do.