Copper Weathervane Pointing Nowhere: Poems

Humans share both space and meaning, but memory individualizes those spaces for each of us. Language, as the means by which we transcribe these images of remembered places into landscapes, links people and contributes to a common memory. The purpose of this project is to explore the relationships that create place out of space. The poems in this collection examine the ways in which our memory turns these places into landscapes-both emotional and natural. In this project I aim to describe the how (and sometimes, why) of this process. It is an attempt to document, as it were, the workings of individual memory becoming shared place-and, thus, shared memory through poetry. Vague, unnamed space becomes personal, cultivatable place through the connection of the natural world and memory, and this in turn connects us to one another. Something I discovered during the creation of this collection: there is a desire in us for escape. We long to run both to and from these landscapes. Whether or not that happens depends on a treacherous balance between our perception of reality and the act of remembrance. Exclusively relying on either memory or empirical data seems to result in a feeling of being trapped in one of the two landscapes. But the fusion of the two can create the escapes we desire, and this often introduces us to new definitions of beauty. I have sought primarily to delve into how we as members of a culture transcribe a collective remembrance of things the world needs to recall. Whether any concrete or conclusive answers came out of that quest matters less than whether I can say I better understand the workings of my own memory and what that means for my future-and I can. An even greater triumph will be if this project prompts and allows others to contemplate the hazy text that is memory, and consider of what landscapes their own lives are expressions