this is going to get shortened but
Statement of Plans
My creative writing plans are always to extend and expand my knowledge and practice in order to attempt to produce literature. This application period finds me both in the middle of some large projects and at the end of a way of thinking about my pursuits which has been productive, but leaves me with some important questions. In other words, it is time for me to reconsider my work and the ways I go about making it. I am well aware that the Stegner is not usually granted to mid-career writers. When I was still pre-book, but both pre- and post-MFA, I applied to you. I would benefit from and contribute to the life of the mind at Stanford and in the world by spending two years in supported workshops, library (research) access, and tuition. I am applying to you again that you might consider that I have a need and plan for two fellowship years.
My book Locket was accepted for publication six years before it was published and nine years after I wrote most of the poems I included in it. During this long wait, this sort of poem I write came to represent my concentration on the lyrical. My most recently-published book, Vauxhall, includes poems I began to write after I completed the first draft of Locket. Thus, it came to represent, to me, my continuing exploration of the lyric. What next? Two manuscripts, which I have excerpted in my sample, represent different sorts of lyric poems which have found their ways into journals more easily than the others, but yet not into books. Two variant groups of narrative lyrics I wrote and still write have gotten lost under my “lyric thread” rubric. As you know better than I could possibly know, Stanford has and has had a “perfect storm” of poets and critics working across aesthetics and theories deeply concentrated on the lyric.
Before Locket reached print, I wrote a project-based book, Heresy. It became the central volume of my trilogy DaDaDa. The response I received to DaDaDa was encouraging, and I expanded the project to chart the idea of the confessional together with women’s writing, modern technology, and 20th century poetics. The second trilogy, entitled OOD: Object-Oriented Design, has been accepted for publication. I am beginning to work on the next trilogy, Dea. This research-intensive writing marries form, theory/philosophy, and my technical knowledge, but it is perhaps most unusual in that it is very long, but not a life work. Or maybe it is unusual because I’m one of the few former software developers formally educated only in poetry.
I began to form a distaff trilogy of works related to the works in the long project. For example, a poem in this book consists of all of the etymological forms of mystic keywords in the device in the Heresy poems of DaDaDa. Some of these poems are in Paper Craft. As a designer, I was careful to write a book to exist importantly in print and as a printout. Many of the poems are dictionary definitions of paper objects folded into that object (plane, airplane, and aeroplane folded into paper airplanes), along with fold lines for creating meta-poems from the printout. A second book which continues to treat texts made of texts as peculiar objects is forthcoming. It is called Craft + Work. There’s another book accepted for publication called Heavy Rotation. I have shown the objects these poems are “read from” in gallery shows locally, nationally, and even internationally.
Another set of works made to take advantage of their .pdf publication uses a series of four Hello Kitty coloring books as source texts. The first, Secret Kitty, is a critique of flarf. The second, Kittenhood, is a collaborative exploration of Olson’s Dogtown and MS Word Art. The projected next volume, Calico Cat, thus far consists of various color-music scales, such as Madame Blavatsky’s, applied to text.
Statement of Plans
My creative writing plans are always to extend and expand my knowledge and practice in order to attempt to produce literature. This application period finds me both in the middle of some large projects and at the end of a way of thinking about my pursuits which has been productive, but leaves me with some important questions. In other words, it is time for me to reconsider my work and the ways I go about making it. I am well aware that the Stegner is not usually granted to mid-career writers. When I was still pre-book, but both pre- and post-MFA, I applied to you. I would benefit from and contribute to the life of the mind at Stanford and in the world by spending two years in supported workshops, library (research) access, and tuition. I am applying to you again that you might consider that I have a need and plan for two fellowship years.
My book Locket was accepted for publication six years before it was published and nine years after I wrote most of the poems I included in it. During this long wait, this sort of poem I write came to represent my concentration on the lyrical. My most recently-published book, Vauxhall, includes poems I began to write after I completed the first draft of Locket. Thus, it came to represent, to me, my continuing exploration of the lyric. What next? Two manuscripts, which I have excerpted in my sample, represent different sorts of lyric poems which have found their ways into journals more easily than the others, but yet not into books. Two variant groups of narrative lyrics I wrote and still write have gotten lost under my “lyric thread” rubric. As you know better than I could possibly know, Stanford has and has had a “perfect storm” of poets and critics working across aesthetics and theories deeply concentrated on the lyric.
Before Locket reached print, I wrote a project-based book, Heresy. It became the central volume of my trilogy DaDaDa. The response I received to DaDaDa was encouraging, and I expanded the project to chart the idea of the confessional together with women’s writing, modern technology, and 20th century poetics. The second trilogy, entitled OOD: Object-Oriented Design, has been accepted for publication. I am beginning to work on the next trilogy, Dea. This research-intensive writing marries form, theory/philosophy, and my technical knowledge, but it is perhaps most unusual in that it is very long, but not a life work. Or maybe it is unusual because I’m one of the few former software developers formally educated only in poetry.
I began to form a distaff trilogy of works related to the works in the long project. For example, a poem in this book consists of all of the etymological forms of mystic keywords in the device in the Heresy poems of DaDaDa. Some of these poems are in Paper Craft. As a designer, I was careful to write a book to exist importantly in print and as a printout. Many of the poems are dictionary definitions of paper objects folded into that object (plane, airplane, and aeroplane folded into paper airplanes), along with fold lines for creating meta-poems from the printout. A second book which continues to treat texts made of texts as peculiar objects is forthcoming. It is called Craft + Work. There’s another book accepted for publication called Heavy Rotation. I have shown the objects these poems are “read from” in gallery shows locally, nationally, and even internationally.
Another set of works made to take advantage of their .pdf publication uses a series of four Hello Kitty coloring books as source texts. The first, Secret Kitty, is a critique of flarf. The second, Kittenhood, is a collaborative exploration of Olson’s Dogtown and MS Word Art. The projected next volume, Calico Cat, thus far consists of various color-music scales, such as Madame Blavatsky’s, applied to text.
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