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When something really moves me,
I feel full; I'm so much more alive at that moment. - Jennifer Ley
One person who uses both poetry and images in compelling fashion is Jennifer Ley, editor of Perihelion. Last week's column dealt with the joint effort of Perihelion and Conspire to showcase the subject of women's writing. As I explored these zines, I became more curious about Ms. Ley. She had accepted several of my poems for publication and sent an e-mail that resulted in my learning how to do something new. She wanted the writers for this issue, if we could, to produce a sound file. She provided how-tos, but never having done this before, I was a little anxious. After a fiasco involving a microphone that turned out to be incompatible with my system, and realizing that it would take several tapings before a good one occurred (no dog barking, no children screaming, no bird squawking when the cat walked by), I finally got the thing done. During our correspondence, Ley mentioned that she had been outdoors all day "shooting." Now what, I wondered, would this talented woman be shooting, exactly? I asked her what she does when she's not editing or writing. "I work as a script supervisor on television commercials," she answered. "There's the perspective I was talking about -everything from that little Taco doggie to Cindy Crawford and Brad Pitt." The "perspective" mentioned applies to questioning Ms. Ley about her work. She replied, "Answering questions about one's work always gives a bit of perspective, and I think I needed it." The reason for that need relates to Ms. Ley's diversity. She is a fine poet, but she is also a fine, and self-declared, "imagist." "Metaphor, verbal or visual, is what really motivates me," she explains. "My formal education was in the visual arts; the art I made, and still make, always relies on building layers of meaning, whether those layers use visual images or words, or - as in my hypertext suites of poems - combinations of the two."
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