How the Ensembles came to be

Picture National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) April 2020. The first tenuous weeks of lockdown. Life in free-fall. Reading my poems every morning becomes a grounding ritual for typesetter Sue Niewiarowski. April 9th’s poem, “Dancing in the Moonlight,” the word “shimmy” sparks. Sue resets the poem: dark sky, luminous moon, inky water, words shimmering. I respond with a whole-hearted “Yes!” And just like that we’re riffing back and forth across time zones and geography, pandemic vertigo be damned.

Only later do we discover that this duet of words and images isn’t a thing. After playing with various names — duets, hybrids, visual poetry, concrete poetry — we settle on Ensembles. We’ve created more than a hundred of them. A few examples can be found via the menu under “Poems.”