Jennifer Moxley

What I’m Working On

I am presently at work on my second book of essays. My first, There Are Things We Live Among, explored angles of human empathy with the object world. The long affinity between birds and poetry is the organizing theme of this new collection, as well as those avian souls that have played a role in my personal history. If you are interested to hear the texture of the writing, you can listen to me reading a couple of essays at the Hammer Museum last May: one about Robert Creeley and Keats’s Ode, one about a very sad bird I once saw on a Paris street. Four more of these essays will be published in poet Nathaniel Mackey’s magazine Hambone in late fall 2018.

            My collaborator, composer Beth Wiemann, and I are also planning a second workshop of our chamber opera, Until the War Is Over, which is based on modernist poet H. D.’s roman à clef Bid Me to Live. The workshop, tentatively scheduled for mid-June, will be offered as part of UMaine’s McGillicuddy Humanities Center’s year-long exploration of the World War I.

            I am, of course, always also writing poems. My seventh book, Druthers, was released last February. In fall of 2017, a few M.A. students and I organized the “First Permission” (after Robert Duncan) poetry group in order to meet and discuss our work. In this nurturing and intellectually inspiring atmosphere I began moving in a non-rhetorical direction, returning to Pound’s mandate that the “natural object is always the adequate symbol.” A few of these new poems were published in the Columbia Poetry Review. Others are appearing this fall in the Ocean State Review.

            If you would like to read, listen to, or watch me read my poems, or know more about my influences and publishing history, there’s more to explore here.