Sara Ellen Fowler will be reading at the Difficult to Name Reading Series on Friday, March 6.

You do such a beautiful job with your writing of giving each poem a sense of place. Whether it's the Dance Hall in Shed Project Notes, August 30, 2019—La Madera, NM (or even just the title of that poem, setting the scene) or "the sun coming over our flat roof" in Snare, how soon into writing a poem does the location factor in? Or do you just found that they've been weaved into the writing when you take a look back?

In my work, psychological landscapes are important. When place matters in a poem, the site and the meaning to be made are interlocked. Like when I write of Chief, "the horse of my childhood," I am always standing in a snowy paddock in Amish country in central Ohio. Or if I describe the Milwaukee Art Museum, the cathedral effect of that architecture and its installation on the banks of Lake Michigan contribute to the vaulting gesture of my imagination that takes shape in that setting. Not every poem is tethered literally and specifically; some poems perch mostly in the conceptual apparatus of the mind. When poems are rooted in place or time, they are from the get-go.

You earned a BFA in sculpture from Art Center College of Design before getting an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Riverside. Do you find that your experience working in sculpture informs your poetry? And if so, how?

My obsessions that were emboldened through sculpture: texture, temperature, presence, sex, and meditative attention--- have remained consistent in my practice of poetry, even while the opportunities and dictates of the verbal medium are different. 

There is a mode of poetry that explicitly engages in dialogue with visual arts. It's called ekphrasis. My practice now often has at least one eye trained on this poetic lineage. I hope to always be in conversation with art. The modulation of how oblique or straightforward that inspiration is will continue to evolve in my work, I think. 

The weather is usually really nice around here, but with spring coming in April, do you have any favorite spring activities in the L.A. area?

While Ascot Hills Park is still green, I love to walk those trails.