For Joanie Mackowski, writing poetry works as an active conversation with aspects of language. By giving herself "assignments," she dares herself to write outside her comfort zone -- such as writing about beings other than humans, for instance, ants and protozoans.

"There's meter, rhyme, language's capacity to describe things ... they're all things that the poet can interact with," she said April 25 at the final Literary Luncheon of the semester at the home of President David Skorton and Professor Robin Davisson.

"I often begin writing in a style because I don't understand it, and I want to," she said.

Mackowski, assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell, is an award-winning poet whose work often involves detailed explorations of nonhumans. Her poems have appeared in the 2007 and 2009 "Best American Poetry" anthologies and such journals as Poetry and The Yale Review. To demonstrate the variety of challenges that she gives herself, Mackowski read aloud several poems from her two published collections, as well as a few from her collection in process.

One descriptive poem she read, for example, involved ants crawling around a bathroom, a sound experiment that relied on a "waltz" rhythm, a contemporary sonnet and two narratives of metamorphosis, among others.

Between her poems, Mackowski described some of the challenges she confronts in the writing process. In the introduction to the poem "Lingerie Department," she mentioned her focus on the intersection between descriptive and aural aesthetics.

"I've found that when you concentrate on sound, the poem takes on a dreamy, surrealistic quality," she said. "In this poem, I wanted to maintain that, but also to effectively describe the setting. And that's rather like lingerie, in that it's really small clothing that really gets your attention," she quipped.

Mackowski also spoke about poetry's interaction with the sciences, particularly her own reflections about the layers of poetic interpretation.

"When studying anaphora, which is the technique of repetition, I started to think about firsts. I thought about the way repetition emerges in nature, like the first cells dividing and replicating, the first snaps of life," she said.

Mackowski addresses this intersection of art and nature in her new work, which she said will include several forays into what she called "eco-critical poetry."

"I'm trying to think about what a non-person-centric poem would look like," she said. "How can we write literature that is not so human-centric? That considers the eco-sphere?"

In one such poem, "History," she writes from the perspective of the early protozoans.

"It's hard," she admitted. "It's hard to write from a nonhuman perspective. But I'm trying to develop a sort of plural perspective. I've been thinking of it as a primordial soup that's trying to understand the world."

During the question-and-answer session, Mackowski said she felt that Ithaca, where she has taught for a year, has begun to influence her work, albeit subtly.

"Being here is really intellectually energizing," she said, though, she admitted, she has yet to indulge in typical Ithaca iconography.

"No gorges or waterfalls have made their appearance so far" in her poetry, she said.

Mackowski is the author of "View From a Temporary Window" (2010) and the award-winning 2002 collection "The Zoo." Her honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Emily Dickinson Prize.

Kathleen Jercich '11 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.