2023. Opt West

In the second volume of Opt West, a new literary journal dedicated to place, editor Colleen Sabaka interviews me and collaborators featured in Quietly Between. After our multi-year exchange of poems and photography, I found it a delight to talk (via Zoom) with Brad Vogler, Sarah Green, and Megan Kaminski. The print version of this conversation seems a vital part of our collaboration.

2023. Among the Neighbors #22

“Kindred Spirits Spark: An Exploration of the Origins and Evolution of The Sisters of Color Writers Collective and Its Literary Journal SEEDS” is featured in the Among the Neighbors series published by the Poetry Collections of the University of Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Origin stories by Esperanza Cintrón, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, and Druis Beasley Knowles—SOC founders—are accompanied by reflections by Lillien Waller and Lori Anderson Moseman. All issues of SEEDS are now online thanks to Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés. To see then, click here.

2022. Among the Neighbors #20

To celebrate the 20th issue of his pamphlet series, Among the Neighbors, University of Buffalo archivist Edric Mesmer invited writers to propose future literary magazines to feature in the series, His lovely introduction “Asterisms Among the Neighbors” is a must read for contributors to little magazines.

My poem about the 1995 CD-ROM The Little Magazine, Volume 21 is the preface of Among the Neighbors, Volume 20.

Among the Neighbors is dedicated to the study of little magazines from 1940 and after. Some of these are case studies of single little magazines; others focus on publishing networks or the materiality of small press publications. Most all issues include bibliographies of contributors to the publications under study. To see pdfs of each of the first 20 volumes of this pamphlet series, click here.

2022. Report from the Mangold Society

Editor rob mclennan invited poets and scholars to praise the work of poet Sarah Mangold. I was delighted to be among 12 writers included in this assemblage published by above/ground press. My four-poem offering creates duets between Mangold’s The Goddess Can Be Recognized By Her Step (Dusie Kollective, 2014) and Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (Fordham University Press, 2021) and Adrienne Rich’s “Sleepwalking Nest to Death,” Times Power. Poems 1985-1988 (Norton, 1989) and the title poem in Fox (Norton, 2021), I wove in too poems I wrote when my mother was dying.

To order The Report from the Mangold Society, click here.

2012. Confluence

In the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River, I founded the press STOCKPORT FLATS to showcase writers whose work builds community. Stockport Flat’s poetry series, CONFLUENCE, seeks such convergence by publishing writers from divergent communities. Hydrologically, a confluence occurs when two or more streams merge or when non-riverine bodies of water meet. Here, you will find poets from the Upper Delaware River Basin alongside poets from Pacific Coast estuaries. Traditional bards from the Great Lakes find a home beside experimentalists from the Rio Grande.

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Mary Olmsted Greene, Permission (2012)

Deborah Woodard, Borrowed Tales (2012

Audrey Naffziger, Desire to Stay (2014)

Esperanza Cintrón, Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise: Detroit Poems (2014)

Suzette Bishop, Hive-Mind (2015)

Nancy Dymond, Sleep Barn (2015)

2008. Witness Post

In the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River, I founded the press Stockport Flats to celebrate writers/activists who work for social justice. Stockport Flats’ series, WITNESS POST, refers refers to a signpost "placed on a claim line when it cannot be placed in the corner because terrain makes sustainability and reclamation difficult.” These writers bear witness to this complex task; their claims work toward awareness and action. 

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This Place Called Us by Lisa Wujnovich and Mark Dunau (2008)

Women Outside: Conversations about Nature, Art & Spirit by Mary Olmsted Greene (2010)

American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry by Lillien Waller (2011)

The Lake Rises: poems to & for our bodies of water by Lisa Wujnovich & Brandi Katherine Herrera (2013)

a shelf topped with books by John Ehab (2015)

2008. Meander Scar

In the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River, I founded the press Stockport Flats to celebrate writers whose work buoyed others’ creativity. Stockport Flats’ poetry series, MEANDER SCAR, features wordsmiths who carve new pathways. The geological term, flood meander scar, refers to a river’s experimentation as high water forges new flow patterns. Post-flood, the mainstream may never frequent these pathways; however, the record of such possibilities intensifies our awareness of how terrain changes. Meander conjures whimsy; scar suggests both injury and healing. These writers examine forms that enact such fullness.

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Matthew Klane, B Meditation (2008)

Belle Gironda, Building Codes (2009)

Deborah Poe, Elements (2010)

Fred Muratori, The Spectra (2011)

Katie Yates, poem for the house (2012)

Kate Schapira, how we saved the city (2012)

Melanie Noel, The Monarchs (2013)

Belinda Kremer, Decoherence (2013)

Laura Neuman, Stop the Ocean (2014)

Laura E. J. Moran, Desire Line (2015)

2000. Canohead Portages

Gathering video-footage for a one-woman show, I portaged a canoe in waterless places.

2001. Canoehead Blackbox

Here are some stills from rehearsal of my one-woman show, "How I Became Canoehead." As a cyborg who read poems in a video-filled blackbox theater at iEAR Studios, I earned an M.F.A in Integrated Electronic Arts in 2001.

2018. Counter-Desecration

I am honored to be included in Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within The Anthropocene. The late Marthe Reed and Linda Russo collected 126 terms and definitions articulated by a diverse international group of poets. The anthology promises new vocabulary for “a world on the brink.”

My entry, “animacy,” is part of an ongoing conversation with Meredith Stricker, author of Our Animal. Our walks and talks inhabit California’s Central Coast — site of the 2016 Soberanes Fire and the 2017 bombogenesis pundits called Lucifer. Our shared reading practice seeks solace, kinship, alienation, abeyance, breath, space and light, so says Meredith in "Why Not The Forest.”

animacy: I hunt in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think:An Anthropology Beyond the Human for the word “animacy” while two mutts sleep at my feet. They bark. We go outside. I see the morning glory has finally bloomed; a white butterfly I do not “identify” visits it too. “Situated, intimate engagement.” That’s how I sum up these pages from the chapter entitled “The Living Thought” which begins with barking dogs followed by a silence. In Quechua: hau’ hau’ hau’ then chun.The dogs are dead. Prey to a puma. Kohn unfolds a complex argument: “If thoughts exist beyond the human, then we humans are not the only selves in this world. We, in short, are not the only kinds of we. Animism, the attribution of enchantment to these other-than-human loci, is more than belief, an embodied practice, or a foil for our critiques of Western mechanistic representations of nature.” I read and take notes so as not to count days: Day 32 of the Soberanes Fire; 7 days, says the vet, until my oldest dog will die — food itself a toxin for her now. As an always already we, we remain a toxin for this planet? I read on, taking notes because Kohn’s animacy (or at least his articulation of it) offers possibility.

2000. iEar Studio

I am scrambling to rescue early digital work I made while earning an MFA in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Most work is stored in formats that are now inaccessible (luckily so). But here are a few images from two works that juxtapose brain slices with rock climbers. You can watch a flash animation of brain slices and skirts (through the ages) here.

2013. The Volta

EVENING WILL COME: A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POETICS

(ISSUE 33, SEPTEMBER 2013—WOMEN OF VISUAL POETRY ISSUE)

I was fortunate to have a poem, “Jet Black” in a special issue of The Volta: Evening Will Come.

Here are parts of editor Jessica Smith’s introduction:

“What is ‘visual poetry’? Just as the question of ‘what is poetry?’ may be answered differently by every reader and practitioner, so “visual poetry” is hard to define closely. The unifying elements of the visual poems presented here seem twofold: first, the following poets responded to the call for ‘visual poetry’ with the following works (a self-defined community); second, the poems privilege the visual or material over the verbal or sonic…. 

In 2008, Geof Huth edited a feature for Poetry titled “Visual Poetry Today” that included eleven men and only two women, K. S. Ernst and Sheila Murphy. Four years later, a new anthology, The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998 – 2008 (ed. Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill), includes many more female poets and a stunning variety of visual poetry from all over the world, but the ratio of male to female poets is still almost 4:1. Meanwhile, in 2008 I edited a feature on women in visual poetry for Phoebe magazine and edited, from 2006 – 2009, a monthly magazine called Foursquare that exclusively published visual poetry by women. For those seeking to define an historical territory for visual poetry, women seem to play an insignificant role in the genre. From my point of view, there are female visual poets everywhere….

The following selection started with a call to a hundred female visual poets and a very tight deadline. mIEKAL aND, Amanda Earl, Luc Fierens, Drew Kunz, rob mclennan and Sheila Murphy were instrumental in helping me gather names and email addresses in the “research” part of the process. I asked contributors to refer their friends, and they were generously forthcoming. Some of the women who responded overlap with the women in The Last Vispo Anthology, but most do not. This selection, like The Last Vispo’s, represents just a fraction of the amount of visual poetry being produced by women. It’s not the first such gathering. But let’s hope it’s not the last.”

2014. Dusie, The Ecopoethos Issue

Dusie.og, The Ecopoethos Issue edited by Marthe Reed

http://dusie.org/issueseventeen.html

“insistence, teeth” is collaboration between poet Lori Anderson Moseman and printmaker Sheila Goloborotko featured in the this Ecopoethos issue of Dusie. See http://www.dusie.org/AndersonMoseman_Goloborotko.pdf

from Marthe Reed’s introduction.

“The generative impulse for this issue of Dusie was in part informed by Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, his challenge to the notion of ‘nature’ as it has historically been constituted, a notion fundamentally invested in isolating human from nature, nature from human. Constructed through the lenses of political/sociological/economic/environmental (and other) tensions, ‘nature,’ ‘place,’ and ‘environment’ are othered and objectified. At the interstices of ecological zones, species, cities, nations, bodies, those permeable borders separating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ human from other-than-human, insider from outsider, the vulnerable from the powerful, how might we reconfigure our understanding, encounter the unbounded condition having neither center nor margin? 

I sought work from writers and artists that speaks into this eco-socio-political moment as an act of witness and of reach, especially works which, having adopting hybridity’s otherness, do not look back. I was amply rewarded. Lori Anderson Moseman writes in her essay-length engagement with grief and the print-works of Sheila Goloborotko, ‘There is nothing new in this save the ever-growing context of complexity’—’Art’s work is to ask for mercy.’ Complexity and mercy… .’ See http://www.dusie.org/Preface.pdf

2016. Forest Under Story

Here’s what editors Nathaniel Brodie, Charles Goodrich and Fredrick J. Swanson have to say about their anthology Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old Growth Forest:

“Two kinds of long-term research are taking place at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a renowned research facility in the Oregon Cascades. Here, scientists investigate the ecosystem’s trees, wildlife, water and nutrients with an eye toward understanding change over varying timescales up to two hundred years or more… . This anthology—which includes work by some of the nation’s most accomplished writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Freeman House, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, and Scott Russell Sanders—grows out of the Long Term Ecological Reflections program and showcases insights of the program’s thoughtful encounters among writers, scientists and place.”

I am honored to have a poem included. “Hope Tour: Three Stops” takes readers to three sites in the forest on a tour with forest scientist Alan Tepley. The poem’s sections visit 1) an old clear-cut, 2) the Blue River Face Timber Sale Unit that was burned as part of the management strategy, and 3) an old growth reference plot that has been left “unmanaged.”

“… perhaps they had wanted fire to kill fewer trees. I am happy / below the charred towers. Landform on this ridge asks for risks. / Snags and seed trees—exposed spires— say design. Dare. / Darkness is the awareness: it may not have been necessary— / their acting here. In this way. … /// Further up the road within what we could have been. / Humbling. The experimental treatments not exactly / an entropy like this…. nearly all she had hoped for / here / then gone.”

Anderson Moseman, pages 154-55

2010. The Forest Log

As a timber cruiser, I used to enter forests with an eye for the merchantable: along a compass line, I’d use a prism (tilted on a clinometer) to determine which trees to measure. Instruments dictated my vision. What if my goal is not to get an accurate estimate of timber yields but to see the forest through the tools of visionary poets?

In 2010, while on a writing residency at H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, I took poems from these poets into long term ecological research plots: Taigu Ryōkan, Ema Saiko, A.R. Ammons, Goran Sonnevi, Arthur Sze, Maria Melendez, Brinda Iijima and Michele Glazer. Within the log decomposition site, the Lookout Creek gravel bar, and the Blue River Face timber sale, I found eight reflection spots and went to work inspired by the above poets.

My practice sequence for each plot: 1) meander, 2) photograph, 3) pause, 4) recite, 5) imitate, 6) resist, 7) record, 8) erase, 9) research. You can see the results of my play/inquiry online at http://www.trickhouse.org/vol11/experiment/loriandersonmoseman/indexa.htm. 

Gauging Stations | Poetry Primer

Of all the cylinders I admire, / it is trees that turn my head / at every gauging station / (old friends, Ryōkan would say, / “like greeting old friends”). // The hydrologist admires the hook / gauge: a still well / until its tip breaks water’s surface…/ there … now read the Vernier scale—/ a measure to bring us to zero, // to calibrate all other instruments. / Saikō might prefer the paper scroll / rolled gingerly / into its watertight cylinder. Or, the act / of tearing it // from the seismograph. / The actual inking—the needle / in fluctuation—would captivate Sonnevi / only when discharge exceeds the margins, / starts recording an inverse. // As if extreme events were a turning / back upon oneself. / Ammons would want/ the record only if he couldn’t watch/ the debris torrent rip / down the watershed: logging’s slash / recruiting snapped snags / cavorting with popped culverts. / A road destined to become a gravel bar /dumped by the main channel at a bend, / Iijima likes the mixing of weekly/ samples—three in the same jug — / and savors the later data breakdown: / a transcript divorced / from the topographical, the topical, // the visceral scramble up the tributary. / Melendez plays / with the spare PVC tubing, / bangs it so motion makes a tuba of it. / All hollows know how to sound out / the poem they got in them. // Perhaps Sze would stand beside me, / admire the trapezoidal flume, the hand / going to the V-notch—its formal / beauty foreshadowing its precision. / (Not just any surface reflects.) // My friend Glazer is always at the edge / of the sediment basin. / She neither leaps into it nor over it. / Somehow, she gets under it. / surface with enough silt / to ground our grief.

2003. Writing on Air

Fifteen years further into climate change, I am revisiting writings collected in 2003 and published by MIT Press. In their introduction to the Terra Nova anthology, Writing on Air, editors David Rothenburg and Wandee Pryor offer an collective OM: “This book is eclectic, so say the least. Broken into parts, it looks at air as substance and metaphor, examining weather and objects in the sky. We have sought to give it back its elusiveness. Air escapes use but it also pervades everything we do, from the laughter that trickles out fo our mouths to the light it carries to the page. It unites us, erasing contradictions by being everything at once. It gives and it takes; it allows movement and forbids.”

“From aerial plankton to Navajo wind gods, from joyful singing to painful emphysema, from gentle breezes to violent storms, Writing on Air creates a fresh way of thinking about the role of air inner everyday lives. Included in the book are prose pieces by poet Hayden Carruth, paulo de costa, Kristjana Gunnars, filmmaker Werner Herzog, Howard Mansfield, Sarah Menin, and C.L. Rawlings; an excerpt from a play by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann on the discovery of oxygen; poems by Lori Anderson, Tõnu Õnnepalu, Andrew Schelling, and Virgil Suárez; and art and photography by Manuel Acevedo, Stuart Allen, Marsha Cottrelll, Susan Derges, the Koraw tribe of the Indian hills, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Tuula Närhinen, and the airborne dancers of Project Bandaloop.”

I am honored to have my “Atomic Nature of MA” included in the conversation.