Migraré

"Migraré begins with the foreign, the Other. a title in a "foreign language," language we used to call any language we did not speak. Today we might call that language a modern language not a foreign one. I wanted to confront the reader with the idea of "to move into" as the poems are entered into, and to thereby suggest the literal meaning of the word migraré in Italian, derived from Latin. I wanted to explore how divisive and fearsome the unknown is, to explore what it might mean to have to create a new identity for ourselves as we continually "move into" new spheres of being, to explore how decentering it might be to have to redraw maps, to move boundaries, to redefine home. I wanted the poems to suggest that the complexities of transformation affect not only what is moved into but also who is moving, the agency of moving and what is moved from. I wanted to begin with something as seemingly simple as rudimentary quantum physics and transfer the knowledge derived from that base study to nationalism, identity, individualism and community. Each of the poems is ekphrastic, each poem a meditation and a keying to an abstract expressionistic painting by Bill Gingles. Ekphrasis more often than not relies on realistic or imagistic art as the springboard for the poem that emerges from it. I wanted the erasure or near erasure of the usual and the expected to be at work in the creation of these meditative poems. I wanted the reader to feel the distance between the visuals of the painting and the nonlinear narratives created inside the poems"--