About the Poems - AV
About the Poems
by Ashley VanDoorn I'm fascinated by things that arouse curiosity and how wonder leads to a field of inquiry that rarely seems linear or logical. I'm inspired by multiple sources when I work, and one of the most rewarding challenges for me is how to order various (re)searches through language and the page in a way that maximizes connections (which makes severance necessary also). For this reason I tend toward syntax that is broken and fused, and structures that are playful and restless. Here are a few of the inspirations for these poems: "Mind of Rime": a chapter on ice formations in a book on weather, a hallucinatory childhood vision of a bible story "On the Causes of Monsters": lots of movies and books on monsters, especially Ambroise Paré's On Monsters and Marvels, published in 1573 "Mirrors and Magnets": articles on nanotechnology, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, John Beckman (1846), A Handy Book of Curious Information, William S. Walsh (1913), Book of Marvels, Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century) "Roboerotics": the Mr. Machine on top of my desk, speaking machines, erotic devices, the electronic devices in my house, von Kempelen's chess-playing automaton "Vamp": various horror movies, various misheard song lyrics, vampires