In her new book of poetry Easinesses Found, Fan Ogilvie uses language to tap into a current of consciousness.

The West Tisbury poet laureate for three years beginning in 2009, Mrs. Ogilvie has taught and organized poetry events on the Vineyard, Washington D.C., Connecticut and New York. Easinesses Found follows her first book, You: Selected Poems and Knot: A Life, which she described as nearly a memoir.

“I love to write, but I had milked my past beyond the point that my family was even comfortable with,” she said. “It was time to really seek out to do work I started to do, which was poems that explore consciousness more than life stories, poems that were exploring language more than trying to get formal poetry written.”

Inspired by great poets such as Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett and Emily Dickinson, she worked to establish a new language for herself. Changing, shifting and finding new meaning in language is something she feels is a responsibility of poets.

“We should be diviners,” she said. “We should be out there ahead of a lot of professionals finding those meanings.”

One poem in the book, Paganini Concerto No 1 in D Major Opus 6 On Laptop, is a jumble of randomly pressed keys.

“That was basically having a lot of fun and not being able to write anything else at the time,” she said.

Each poem in Easinesses Found stands alone. They are organized alphabetically rather than to construct a narrative.

“The last poem is about writing,” she said. “I went how did that happen? It’s like you can’t get away from intentional organization. Sometimes you get some really happy chances.”

She readily admits that the lack of an overall story and stream of consciousness style of the poems can be difficult for the reader.

“It’s not easy to read in the beginning, it’s sometimes uncomfortable . . . But if you read them a couple of times or hear them, you can start to hear meaning and associative meaning in all of them.”

Paired with the poems in the book is a selection of Mrs. Ogilvie’s paintings which also lean toward abstraction.

Many of the poems are done in long couplets and end with a period. In the forward to the book she described finding them by “following a trail of thinking until it was completed.”

Some have dedications, including a few to the guys at the Gray Bar Hotel, the insider name for the Edgartown house of correction where she ran an inmate poetry program.

The inmates opened her up to new poetic voices. As she shared with them Robert Frost, they shared with her Tupac Shakur.

“I never knew any of the hip hop artists and now I have these many CDs of hip hop,” she said gesturing to indicate a sizable stack. “The lyrics are different and it gave me a different way to work with them. When we got to hip hop and used the lyrics of their life it just changed enormously and they wrote their heads off, they really did.”

In the poem Tupac, and dedicated to the inmates and the man himself, she ends:

so unlike the rose that grew from concrete in cracks of man and nature
he knew nothing would change his luck if he could but get a torn footing.

Much like the poem titles, the title for the book occurred to her and stuck with her. Easinesses Found comes from a quote by Valery Larbaud. The phrase resonated with her, though a friend denounced it as a bad title. But true to finding her own language, Mrs. Ogilvie held firm on the title.

Fan Ogilvie will hold a poetry reading on Jan. 23 at 4 p.m. at the West Tisbury Library. On opening reception for her artwork is Jan. 9 at the West Tisbury Library from 4 to 5 p.m.