Since 2020 I have been making work that joins my poetic practice with my experience in visual arts and performance. Among this work is A Procession For ______, which uses the form of the religious, labor, or suffrage procession to bring language that is often tacit into public view.
At Scripps College, in one iteration of this project (PROCESS!, see below), we painted the names of threatened species in our area of southern California onto banners to carry alongside processional objects—animal and plant forms painted with excerpts from the 1969 Environmental Protection Act—made by students. Our procession made these names and legal ideas visibly and legibly present.
In November 2025, I’ll work with members of the Native American Cultural Center at my current institution to make banners for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives march here. We will make banners that hold words for relations—’sister’, ‘mother’, ‘uncle’, ‘sibling’, and many more—in Indigenous languages we collect from speakers in the area and on campus. (There are students, staff and faculty representing 34 Native Nations on my campus.) These banners will call out to the many people whose loss or nonpresence may not always be tangible, bringing them momentarily into immediate relation with viewers and marchers by the invocation of their relatedness to us.
The procession as a form draws people together and is an opportunity to re-present language, to reimagine what it is possible to say together. I have learned through my long apprenticeship to poetry that invocation by name makes people, beings and landforms appear. The phrasings, which draw on litany and other ritual forms, reorganize viewers’ understandings of where we are and who is with us, binding us together in an experience of sacredness and solidarity.
This project embodies my interest in making poems that have their being through collective action in public space in addition to any life on the page. It’s one of two large-scale projects in public/social practice poetics I’ve been working on. The other is A Great Poem.
In spring 2025 I worked with students at the Claremont Colleges to develop and perform a procession that brought the names of local plants, animals, birds, insects, fungi, and landforms into view. Walking through a landscape, much of the “who is here with me” escapes my notice. By slowly painting the names of the beings who are present there, we learn to think about them—and by bringing those names into the landscape, the banner activates their presence, or our attention to their presence, in a new way.
For PROCESS!, each student and I made a large-scale model of one local being or landform—birds, fish, plants, mountains. On these, we painted language from the Environmental Protection Act of 1969. This helped us see the language of this foundational legal document of US environmentalism as alive, active, and meaningful—and to bring that language with us into the landscapes it silently and invisibly helps to protect.
We then generated our own texts that combined the habits of religious or sacred language (litany, anaphora, and words borrowed directly from our own traditions) with the names of endangered and threatened species from the area (southern California). We painted these texts on banners which were mounted on wooden supports, and carried these in a procession during which we sang and danced as we made our way through the campuses of Scripps and Pitzer Colleges.