Every individual is as complex as my poetry; I will continue to honor that gift.

–Jay Wright

The poet and theorist Fred Moten says: "I wanted to figure out a way to write about these performances, to record them, without killing them or capturing them." Art isn't static, but explanation of art can be. In that way, we kill what we love with our love. To me, the act of writing means giving them room to grow. This is different than a romantic impulse toward self-expression without accountability, without thought, history, or criticism. Art depends on our ability to stare into its uncertainty without destroying it; to critique it while acknowledging it is always moving, and making our criticisms responsive to this fact.

In February 2008, the poet Reginald Shepard’s essay, Who You Callin’ Post- Avant?, described the practitioners of this poetic: “Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and personal experience. But they don't just discard the self as an ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative of any variety. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle. They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric.” I have never specifically identified with any particular school of poetics, however, I resonate strongly with the core values Shepard posits with the term “post- avant”, and I instinctively exercise a similar aesthetic sweep; a “magpie eclecticism” as he put it. Dawn Lundy Martin described it herself: “What is the form for the thing that wants to be said? This is not an already answered question when I set out to create something.” My poems engage reality, our cultural moment, on reality's terms, but also, in spite of reality. They wonder, aloud, why I should be loyal to the reality of this time, this place?

If Wright’s assertion above is to be believed, poetry, and its resources of meaning-making, are a harbor; you get to sail off and come back home, unconditionally. Thought of another way, we might always be journeying to and from some harbor, which means, maybe, home is actually the ship.

To be a writer, I agreed the reality of allegiance must first be found within; I am an ouroboros, and so must be everyone else. No history overcomes this, but history can distract depending on how it’s told and what is done in its name. Therefore, you, reader, can’t truly join me on my page, but you’re “freely invited to re-create in [your] own mind”, as Louise Gluck said, which is the only place I’d ever want to meet you all.