I have overlapping interests in poetry and philosophy. As a poet, I am an experimentalist, taking inspiration from modern and postmodern poets who play with new forms. Mostly, I write about environmental and philosophical problems. As a philosopher, my research focuses on the embodied social experience and the ways that selfhood is bound up in the selfhood of others as well as the environment in which we find ourselves. Both of these interests inform the way I teach poetry. Together, we will read some great works of ecopoetry and figure out how and why it challenges us to think about who we are and our relationship to the natural world. We will start by learning to appreciate the choices poets make, and to identify and evaluate the technical accomplishments in their poems. And, as a creative writing class, we will learn how to incorporate the techniques we admire into our own writing process.
