Communication – Alison Stagner

2016 Jack Straw Writer Alison Stagner‘s poems balance lyricism and beauty with threat and violence as she attempts to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between our internal selves and the outer world. She talks to program curator Karen Finneyfrock about this and other fascinations, as well her method of writing poems orally, often while walking her dog. “I think the walking helps me pace my poems and helps me syntactically. . . . Because when you’re not writing anything down, you have to keep track of the thought process that goes into the sentence.”

Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.