Ley Lines

Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. This book too marks alignments and creates pathways, but its sacred sites are not monuments, they’re artworks and poems. Its various forms of exchange between writers and artists offer unique access to contemporary art, poetry, and the creative process. 

In this unique anthology, working poets respond to questions about their recent books, painters and other artists offer statements about their work, and writers respond to artworks. These offerings and exchanges are juxtaposed so as to speak to one another in a capacious, resonant dialogue. The result is a broad-minded and inclusive poetics, a vision of creative work as a constituent of personal and civic life. 

Anyone who nurtures the creative impulse will enjoy Ley Lines and return to it again and again. Writing students, art students, and any reader engaged in artistic practice will find in Ley Lines not a how-to manual or step-by-step instruction but an inexhaustible vein of instructive reflection on imaginative work and the creative life. 

Chapter 1 Capacious Enlivened Sense, Complex Daily Ardor

Between: Paisley Rekdal | Anne Lindberg | Renée Ashley

Balance: Zach Savich | Vera Scekic | Jericho Brown

Representation: Johanna Skibsrud | Ien Dobbelaar | Michelle Boisseau

We experience the world in ways that shape, and can correct, how we understand it. The writers and artists in this chapter ask after what life might be if we sought neither to subdue experience by understanding nor to subdue understanding by experience, but instead to embrace their dynamic interrelationship.

Chapter 2 Most Importantly I Have My Library

Archive: Brian Teare | Thomas Lyon Mills | Evie Shockley

Scan: Matthew Cooperman | Bruce Checefsky | Mary Quade

Things: Lia Purpura | Jason Dodge | Philip Metres

The writers and artists respond to various repositories (the archive, the library, the palimpsest, catacombs, the list). They recognize the forms of gathering, ordering, preserving, and attending that create and accompany repositories as dynamic rather than static, and as consequential: as spiritual and ecological and civic and ethical.

Chapter 3 Only Rearrange the Stones

Repetition: Jon Woodward | Doug Russell | Andrew Joron

Pattern: Scott King | Gerry Trilling | Nin Andrews

Spacing: Gillian Conoley | Phillip Michael Hook | Alex Stein

A rigid and narrow concept of time constricts experience and understanding. The sages in this section suggest that such possibilities as visionary experience, sanctuary, and integration are conditioned by a capacious and multiplex, rather than a narrow and singular, understanding of time.

Chapter 4 Here Long Enough to Disappear

Complexity: Lily Brown | Sreshta Rit Premnath | Debra Di Blasi

Complexity: Veronica Golos | Alisa Henriquez | Caleb Klaces

Opposition: Catherine Taylor | Jane Lackey | Carol Moldaw

Hix's own identity is partly constructed by his response to others, and vice versa. How, then, make himself — his dispositions, his actions, his affects — responsible to others? How respond to others such that his identity is enlarged by theirs, not theirs reduced to his? The interlocutors here pursue those questions.

Chapter 5 Each Begun With a Stain

Voices: Jacqueline Jones LaMon | Murat Germen | Nina Foxx

Particulate: Laurie Saurborn Young | China Marks | Denise Duhamel

Connections: Valerie Martínez | Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann | Anis Shivani 

The oppositions familiar from philosophy — appearance vs. reality, presence vs. absence, and so on — are familiar because we face them continuously. The participants in this exchange, alert to such oppositions, posit connections that bridge the opposed terms, relieving (or using) the oppositions.

Chapter 6 Alive in a Strange Region

Response: Kristi Maxwell | Aviva Rahmani | Rupert Loydell

Language: Jill Magi | Brian Dupont | Rita Wong

Words: Jena Osman | Sarah Walko | Bin Ramke

Listening matters, which is why the health of a democracy depends utterly on its securing and maintaining freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not a liberty, but a possibility condition for democracy itself. The contributors to this chapter are engaged in, or engaged towards, “a poetics of listening.”

Chapter 7 To Invent a Method

Beauty: Kathleen Wakefield | Anne Devaney | Jonathan Weinert

Aura: Sue Sinclair | Anna Von Mertens | Afaa Michael Weaver

Space: Dan Beachy-Quick | Cassandra Hooper | Alyson Hagy

If what “makes you stand up and watch” differs for each of us, how might any one of us learn to honor those particular things that make her/him stand up and watch? The writers and artists in this chapter offer instructive examples of the necessary attunement.

Chapter 8 This and Other Labor-Intensive Techniques

Attention: Julie Hanson | Adriane Herman | Laura Mullen

Confrontation: Sandra Simonds | Jim Sajovic | Susan Aizenberg

The Real: Lisa Fishman | Leeah Joo | Jennifer Atkinson

Our relationship to reality is not given, not simple, not imbued automatically with authenticity.We  might live in such a way that we make ourselves real, or in such a way that we fail to do so. The conversants in this section are reflective about our relationship to reality.

Chapter 9 The World to Me

Event: Paige Ackerson-Kiely | Christine Drake | Cynthia Atkins

Moments: Warren Heiti | Susan Moldenhauer | Bruce Bond

Setting: Juliana Spahr | Leah Hardy | Christine Gelineau

If, in the terms of chemistry, we are elemental (i.e., made of hydrogen, carbon, etc.), in the terms proposed by the visionaries in this section we are composed of such elements as finitude, thought, emotion, and understanding, need, effacement, idiosyncracy, secrecy, and reverberation.

Chapter 10 And Their Shadows At the Same Time

Failure: Kirsten Kaschock | Daniel Dove | Ann McCutchan

Uncertain: Barbara Maloutas | Christopher Leitch | Supriya Bhatnagar

Disappearance: Jared Carter | Shelby Shadwell | Alison Calder

What we perceive cannot be separated from how we perceive. The savants in this section see various objects, and see variously, but all seek to understand and enliven and expand their perception. They set themselves to see “shapes and shadows at the same time.”