The title, Artifacts, is a compost of words art and fact—with fact as Latin for “something made.” A poet recreates language from syllable, word, and shard, and ropes off sacred or desecrated places. The movement of the imagination from small to sublime, from clay shard or carved flint arrow to cultural landscape, is a useful analogy for poetics – a field school approach influenced by my studies in anthropology. Artifacts’ poems vary in context (place), but each explores emblematic structure, kinetic tension, eco-poetics and a language-driven (vs. idea-driven) process. Sections include: Turning the Field: Structure and Surprise; Examining Shards: Emblematic Poems; Piecework Expertise: Poet as Archaeologist and Curator; and, The Nature of Dig Sites: Locality, Language and Transformation. In conclusion: “The artist, poet, ecologist and archaeologist each use imagination, locality, and all of experience to recreate a whole from fragments, emblems, syllables, and the tension of words, wire and line.
