“What I find most inspirational are large masses of birds—any kind. Geese, blackbirds, crows, etc.
I also find some birds inspirational in singles, particularly these three ducks—wood, harlequin, hooded merganser (especially!!) The surf scoter is okay too.
“Also I like wildly colored reptiles and amphibians, particularly poison ones, like poison-dart frogs. Can be: in the wild (best), in books, in zoos, even with the sadness associated with captivity. And those tanks of drapey lingerie-like jellyfish: yow!
“Really, anything will do for inspiration, and one has to limit one’s watching of something like Double Indemnity after the twelfth double-indemnity poem. Or, who knows, maybe the world needs thirteen? I also like the science section of the newspaper, for the pictures. An eleventh-century skull of a female vampire exhumed recently—we know she’s a vampire because someone wedged a brick in her mouth. We do not need more than that to get going.”
“But don’t take that one (the brick vampire), because she’s mine."
—Lucia Perillo, author of Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
Photo credit: James Rudy