Loved words even at a young age

Natasha Trethewey

Mississippi poet Natasha Trethewey was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi, to Eric Trethewey (also a poet ) and Gwendolyn Grimmette Trethewey. Before Trethewey started grade school, her parents divorced, and she moved to Decatur, Georgia, with her mother. As a youth, Trethewey spent her summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and in New Orleans with her father.

She has always loved words and even at a young age spent much of her time in a library reading as many books as possible. When Trethewey was nineteen (1985), her mother passed away (Emory Report). After high school, Trethewey earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Georgia in English and creative writing. She earned her Master's degree in English and creative writing at Hollins University, where her father is a professor of English and the author of three collections of poems. Later, she went to the University of Massachusetts from which she received her M.F.A. in poetry (Gale).

Throughout Trethwey's career, she has received many awards, including grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to continue her work on Bellocq's Ophelia, (poems based on her work as a graduate student about photographs of prostitutes in the 1900's in New Orleans). For "Storyville Diary" she won the Grolier Poetry Prize. In 1999, she was selected by Rita Dove to receive the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet for Domestic Work , which was published in the fall of 2000 by Graywolf Press. In 2001, she received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for poetry.

She received the prestigious Bunting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has received money from the Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund award. Other awards that Trethewey has received include the Margaret Walker Award for poetry, the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Memorial Award for poetry, the Julia Peterkin Award at Converse College, and the Distinguished Young Alumna Award at the University of Massachusetts (Gale).

Trethewey's work has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines. She has published two collections of poetry: Domestic Work and Bellocq's Ophelia. Her current work in progress is called Native Guard and is also a collection of letter poems by black guardsmen who were once stationed at Gulfport, Mississippi. In addition to Trethewey's father Eric being a poet, her stepmother also has published collections of poetry (Emory Report). Trethewey taught as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama before accepting her current position as an assistant professor of English, poetry, and creative writing at Emory University in Decatur, Georgia.

Some of her poems

Domestic Work, 1937

All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper—
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to--that look saying
Let's make a change, girl.
But Sunday mornings are hers—
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
Cleanliness is next to godliness ...
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.
Nearer my God to Thee ...
She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.

Flounder

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
you 'bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.
Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.
This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
'cause one of its sides is black.
The other is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.


Pilgrimage

Here, the Mississippi carved
its mud-dark path, a graveyard

for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
Here, the river changed its course,

turning away from the city
as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up
above the river's bend—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

they must have seemed like catacombs,
in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

candlelit, underground. I can see her
listening to shells explode, writing herself

into history, asking what is to become
of all the living things in this place?

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
in the long hallways, listen all night

to their silence and indifference, relive
their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
preserved under glass—so much smaller
than our own, as if those who wore them
were only children. We sleep in their beds,

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
in flowers—funereal—a blur

of petals against the river's gray.
The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads
Prissy's Room. A window frames

the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,
the ghost of history lies down beside me,
rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

Providence
What's left is footage: the hours before
Camille, 1969—hurricane
parties, palm trees leaning
in the wind,
fronds blown back,

a woman's hair. Then after:
the vacant lots,
boats washed ashore, a swamp
where graves had been. I recall

how we huddled all night in our small house,
moving between rooms,
emptying pots filled with rain.

The next day, our house—
on its cinderblocks—seemed to float
in the flooded yard: no foundation

beneath us, nothing I could see
tying us to the land.
In the water, our reflection
trembled,
disappeared
when I bent to touch it.

Writing career like an amateur circus performer

Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), which won the Hayden Carruth Award, and of Lost Alphabet (2009). A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from both the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Centrum Foundation, Olstein has been widely published. She presently serves as associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts and is a cofounder of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action.

A nano-interview

MCC: What’s new and exciting at Juniper Initiative these days?
Lisa: We’re gearing up for this year’s annual literary festival (April 24 & 25) which will celebrate the Massachusetts Review’s 50th anniversary with two days of readings, performances, and a journal and book fair. Readers will include Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Hacker, Christian Hawkey, Lucy Corin, Thomas Glave, and others. And, we’re happily processing applications for this June’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, a weeklong program (one for adults, one for high school aged writers) of poetry, fiction, and memoir workshops, along with readings and craft sessions. Faculty and writers in residence include Mark Doty, James Tate, Lydia Davis, Dara Wier, Charles D’Ambrosio, Paul Lisicky, and other amazing writers.
MCC: How do you balance your duties at Juniper and the MFA Program with your writing career?
Lisa: Ideally: carefully, and with joy. Realistically: like an amateur circus performer juggling flaming hoops in a tiny car. . .
MCC: What are you working on these days, writing-wise?
Lisa: Poems that, hopefully, will make up my third collection. My second book of poems, Lost Alphabet, will be out this June.
MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?
Lisa: Li Po (she says with conviction).
MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?
Lisa: Longhand on random slips and scraps to jot down passing phrases, then computer for the real deal, such as it is.
MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?
Lisa: d) dolphin trainer, of happy, cage-free, entirely fulfilled human- and trick-loving dolphins.
MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?
Lisa: Anywhere from none (a rare and delightful occurrence) to dozens.
MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?
Lisa: I really try not to, but occasionally a word here or there.
MCC: Please revise the following sentence:Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.
Lisa:Sanderson crept.
Every muscle, urge him
toward caprice. Urge him
forward toward window
stinted grey-green in the body.
Urge him not to.

Some of her poems
Deserter’s Information Center

The flags on Main Street say
you are one, are you one of us?
They hang in the exhalation
of three thousand people sleeping,
breathing deeply, eyes whirring,
coding messages, shedding messages,
the night before a parade.
Coyotes are lying down in their dens.
The nest of phoebes has not yet woken;
the half of each bird’s brain that sleeps,
remains sleeping. Corn repeats itself
into a haze of tassels and sheaving leaves.
Autumn sharpens its knives.
No more movies hung on sheets
in the park, in the school parking lot,
until next year. Next year.
Your children will become unrecognizable.
They will love a picture of you
more than you every time you speak.
The smell in the hall will migrate
back and forth between memories,
behind doors: substitute ghost
once again waiting, once again come

Negotiation

You take the mortar; I’ll take the pestle,
the weight we laid five years before the door.

You take the door, its flank and hollow.
You take the hollow morning we set out,

I’ll take the conch shell, the sea.
You take the sea, our kitchen window looking out on it.

I’ll take the kitchen; you take the potatoes,
their rough edges, their eyes.

You take the flashlight’s eye we turned skyward
to rebut the stars. I’ll take the sky it travels.

You take my fear of long journeys, of talking in my sleep.
I’ll take sleep and the first morning sounds

of the monastery on the hill. You take the monks;
I’ll take the way they sweep the ground

before every step, the way they nurse other men’s
crippled oxen through long flickering nights.

That Magnificent Part the Chorus Does about Tragedy

There is a theory of crying that tears are the body’s way ofreleasing excess elements from the brain. There is a theory ofdreaming that each one serves to mend something torn, likecells of new skin lining up to cover a hole. I’m not one to havedreams about flying, but last week we were thirty feet above thebay—this was where we went to discuss things, so that no matterwhat we decided it was only we two out there, and we’d haveto fly back together. I’m not one to have dreams where animalscan speak, but last night a weeping mare I’d been told to bridlewanted me to save her.

Dear One Absent This Long While

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

Thousands of planes were flying and then
they stopped. We spend days moving our eyes

across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor;
we prepare for almost nothing that might happen.

Early on, distant relations kept calling.
Now, nothing: sound of water

tippling a seawall. Nothing: sparks
lighting the brush, sparks polishing the hail,

the flotsam of cars left standing perfectly still.
Thud of night bird against night air,

there you are on the porch, swath
of feathers visible through the glass,

there you are on the stairs where the cat fell
like a stone because her heart stopped.

What have you found in the wind above town square?
Is it true that even the statues have gone?

Is there really a hush over everything as there used to be
in morning when one by one we took off our veils?

Another Story with a Burning Barn in It

I was on the porch pinching back the lobelia
like trimming a great blue head of hair.

We’d just planted the near field, the far one
the day before. I’d never seen it so clear,

so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm.
They say pearls must be worn or they lose their luster,

and that morning I happened to remember,
so I put them on for milking, finding some

sympathy, I guess, between the two.
Usually I don’t sit down until much later in the day.

The lobelia was curling in the sun. One by one
birds flew off, and that should have been a sign.

Trust is made and broken. I hardly sit down
at all. It was the time of year for luna moths,

but we hadn’t had any yet settling on the porch
or hovering above the garden I’d let the wild rose take.

Dear One Absent This Long While

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.

Activist Poet

Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff was born in 1967 in New York City to Pamela Perry Wolff, of Nashville, Tennessee, and Anthony Wolff, a native of Brookline, Massachusetts who was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Rebecca and Nic attended the Fifteenth Street School, a "free" school based on A. S. Neill's Summerhill School in Suffolk,England, until 6th grade. Rebecca went on to Friends Seminary for middle school, and then to Stuyvesant High School. She published her first poem at the age of 15, in Seventeen Magazine, and her next soon after in the journal Hanging Loose's special section for high school age writers.

Wolff spent her first one and a half years of college at Bennington, in Vermont, majoring in Poetry, dropping out during the Field Work Term of her sophomore year, while she was interning at David R. Godine publishers. She stayed in Somerville, Massachusetts for a year and a half and worked the first of many jobs in the health food industry. Eventually Wolff finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, attaining a Bachelors Degree with a Special Concentration in Poetry and Self-Consciousness in 1991.

Her final year of undergraduate study was spent in Glasgow, Scotland, at the University there, though much of her time was spent hitchhiking around Europe, protesting the Gulf War as a member of the Socialist Party, and re-foresting the moorlands as a member of the "Green Group." Upon her return to the United States Wolff traveled to Iowa, where she attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, from which she received her MFA in Poetry in 1993. Wolff then spent several years living in Truro, on Cape Cod, and working at another health food store.

She next moved to Houston, Texas, where she entered the MFA program in Fiction, but only stayed a year. While in Houston Wolff was employed as managing editor of the journal Gulf Coast, and it was this experience that allowed her to think that she would be able to organize her own literary journal, which she began doing upon her return to New York City in 1997.

In the spring of 1998 Fence was launched, with a crew of founding coeditors including Caroline Crumpacker, Jonathan Lethem, Frances Richard, and Matthew Rohrer. The next nine years of Wolff's life were devoted to publishing the journal, and also to Fence Books, launched in 2001, in a fairly typical "labor of love" style. During these years Wolff found paying gigs at the Poetry Society of America, BOMB magazine, and as a freelance editor for publications such as BookForum and PenguinPutnam.

In 2001 her first book of poems, Manderley, was published by the University of Illinois Press, after having been selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. In June, 2002 Wolff married the novelist Ira Sher, , and their son Asher Wolff was born in August. In September of 2004 Wolff's second book of poems, Figment, was published by W. W. Norton as a winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and in December Margot Sher was born. In the summer of 2005 the family relocated permanently to Athen, New York, , a river town in the Hudson Valley. In 2007, Fence and Fence Books found sponsorship at the University at Albany, in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute, of which Wolff is now a Program Fellow.

Some of her poems
Life of Sorts

Stopping under the speaking tree
tracing the lines of my own face

with well lubricated fingertips
I am not now

nor ever have I been
free with myself,

and you know why that is.
If I could only learn to make the perfect skirt

I would never work again.
My own line. "To what do you attribute

your success?" Talent and genius.
A talent for genius: Crows paired up in the black tree

lift off metonymically,
two feathers ride an invincible,

blooded draft. My life
as an activist

begins.
Eminent Victorians
Half the day is dead already—

a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard

promenade not quite the idea

but the first idea to be impressed

so firmly—Grace to be born

in the

bisected quadrangle

stones propped insensible

but all in relation

to the babe.
Babe what suckles

babe what grows comfortable with thieves in a fertile

bed of unsaid

slice of eponymous

grafted to the reef

Hold my hand

in the undergrowth

waist high at your leisure cheerful

child of melancholy and displeasure.

Soft in the lap you grow

hard at the breast—Oh

under- and aboveground we go

to relieve us. Camphor

and cambric by the hand not by halves,

one turn more
will take us back to where we rest.

Baby is not baby when she

wears her oblong

freshet

I will take her home to rest.



Lost in thought, the baby

Primarily
I am a mother.

When he was sick;
I engaged his imagination

with a book—
the perfect—I seized it; his

weakened defenses.
This is the way I have

filled his mind
egg and milk and butter and bread

all together—
that's a lot for a small child to take in.

Like Maisie
in the novel is a sieve.

What we want to cultivate in him:
A fat man's

personality on a thin man.



Invidious Comparison
Fat kids of the South

with early breasts

in the swimming pool outside

and as rites of passage go,

it's a benign and thoughtful entry.
There is an expression I keep hearing

I wanted to use it. I looked for it in popular music:

If she's a nun then I'm the pope.
Don't ask me what I'm doing.

I'm thinking it's only this beautiful

here. Now my body is made of long-standing

spirituality, by nature benign. Don't laugh: I'm a

Lotus-flower Gentle Sitting-still Woman.

And another paradigm slips into

place like the diamond it

sounds like. I'm no go-getter—

what am I after all but a
raft.

A Literary Lioness with a zookeeper's heart

Diane Ackerman

Born Diane Fink, born October 7, 1948 in Waukegan, Illinois , she was raised in Waukegan, Illinois. She received her B.A. in English from Penn State and an M.F.A. and Ph.D in English from Cornell University in 1978. Her dissertation advisor was Carl Sagan. From 1980 to 1983 she taught English at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been married to novelist, Paul West since 1970. She currently resides in Ithaca, New York. A collection of her manuscripts, writings and papers (the Diane Ackerman Papers, 1971-1997--Collection No. 6299) is housed at the Cornell University Library. Ackerman's book A Natural History of the Senses inspired the five-part Nova miniseries Mystery of the Senses , which she hosted.

Ackerman's awards and honors include: a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize.. She was named a "Literary Lion" by the New York Public Library, and a molecule ("dianeackerone") has been named after her. In 2008 she won the Orion Book Award for The Zookeepers Wife

Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by millions of readers all over the world. Humans might luxuriate in the idea of being “in” nature, but Ms. Ackerman has taught generations that we are nature—for “no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams.” In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations—of things ranging from the cloud glories to the human brain to endangered whooping cranes—urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles. Her 2007 work of narrative nonfiction, The Zookeepers Wife, received the Orion Book Award, which honored it as "a groundbreaking work of nonfiction, in which the human relationship to nature is explored in an absolutely original way through looking at the Holocaust. A few years ago, 'nature' writers were asking themselves, How can a book be at the same time a work of art, an act of conscientious objection to the destruction of the world, and an affirmation of hope and human decency?

The Zookeeper's Wife answers this question." Speaking deeply to readers of all ages, it has been chosen as a Freshman Reads and Community Reads book in many cities. Ms. Ackerman's other works of nonfiction include: An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying; and A Natural History of the Senses.

Some of her poems

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the star

Afterthought
Toadies thick as an Egyptian plague
line your office each afternoon.
Wit-lame and mincing, they backpat or effuse.
People stop in the hallways to discuss your mood—
the deft, the spoonfed, those with brains of rattan.
Stricken, I wince as you rally each
with well-tried, if tonic, deceits.
Sweet years, I rode your faith’s catamaran,
thought I’d a special affection specially won.
When my metal fretted, lest it fly apart,
I coiled you round the mainspring of my heart.
But you were lukewarm to me as to any other,
nesting your indifference in charm.
All the while I flourished in your countenance,
you gulled me, you led me a dance,
wooed me as protçå, lady-love, confrère,
when you never cared, you never cared.

A Chapter from the Garden

Where hot pipes
run under the pool deck
a garter snake
we tag “World Without End”
finds central heating
a boon to his aging hide.

He still likes to stroll
ten yards of bleached wood
to be swell
under the porte-cochere
of a cushion yew, or better yet
ladder up its needles
and coil right on top
in sunswilling rapture.

We find him there
each afternoon, an odalisque
in a striped caftan
resting his head
on one long elbow,
basking and feeding,
high, narrow, and handsome.

Nor does he mind
our infant-like ogling,
though a warm pea
offered to him on a fork tine
made him leap
down into the bowels of the bush
and whip under the pool deck
for quick cover.

Most days, tolerant to a fault,
he puts up with all
our menu mischief, barracuda stares,
poking and sarcasm,
treating us even
to his red forked tongue,
and Hindu rope trick
(where he disappears
down a coil of himself).

At sundown, he staggers
through the grass,
back to the slender missus
we often find at slink
beneath the wild orchids,
dashing and cool,
full of nobody’s business,
a snatch of melody
in summer’s unbroken hum.

Losing the Game
On the face of this midfielder,
a saint’s passion.

Sweat brilliantines his hair
flat as a seal pup’s fur.

Thorns rake one knee, and fatigue
is a train whistle that never quits.

In his mind, the falcon of defeat
slips off its own hood

and sails into the vapory cold December,
hangs like a crucifixion over the field,

then slants down the wide thermal
of his shame. Today 2 + 2 is algebra,

and nothing will transmute
his base metal to gold leaf.

When crowd and players have gone,
he watches the sun set

under a tumultuous bruise of sky,
below the empty grin of the bleachers,

deep into the valley,
a ghastly, yellow bile draining out.

The young and lovely

Bridget Arsenault

Bridget Arsenault is a twenty-two year old graduate student at Oxford University. During her undergraduate degree at Smith College in Massachusetts, she won the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize for excellence in fiction writing awarded by Smith College, the Sylvia Plath Memorial Award, an annual intercollegiate writing contest for poetry and prose, and the Smith College Excellence in English Award. These are the first poems she has published.

The Nightself

Swallow the sun
to bring the night.
the smell of blood,
crisp and wet, like
rusted pipes and
sewery veins hangs
in the room
the battlefield of this
primitive surgery.
Thick musk—leather and soot, shrouds
first the torso, then
the thigh,
over the calf and to the tip
of the pinky toe.
Pulverize the beautiful
acerbic charm
luring from the corner.
An echo of a howl claws
the room, side
to side
rotting from the inside
out.

In the Eyes of the Tiger

Hands the size of teacups
never chainsaws
Her once loved face
crumbles
She blinks with thick compliance
He still finds her
beauty
___in a certain light

Etiquette Lessons in San José

Flying overhead watching San José
become a toy
city, then a geometric blob
Her glassy-eyed pieties
her tanned bare feet like sandpaper
against brittle pavement
her head throbs her head throbs her head throbs
the unrefined staccato of her taste; their
buttery thighs tied up in knots
his threads of grey
a conversational trope like the stock market
her chiseled heart
Day trips to El Carmen and San Sebastián
an evening at the Teatro Nacionel, after
a Gold Museum, before
an oak-paneled laundry room

The Wedding

She loved music
thick, rough, grinding, heavy, gripping, pounding, music
the charisma of a C major, the lure of an F sharp
rag, blues, funk, A cappella, rock, rhythm
sweat, man, spittle, whiskey, morning after—smells
A pock mark where
the music’s been removed
now she finds darkness wrapped in a large handkerchief
the ugliness of the night undressed
beer un-suctioning thighs
Wince
Cigarettes and wedding bands
humming in white only
a Chocolate Lake
space touching her
flowers rotted like flesh
throw rocks
throw anything
Chink
Eyes closed to concentrate
lost in a pot hole on the Trans Canada
tall trees
tall men
a room full with colours of people
fuchsia, tangerine, saffron, crimson and pistachio
Discard.

Answers Like Filling in a Questionnaire

Answers like filling in a questionnaire
___If only they’d been more tolerant
A voice high and unstable
Pulsing tongues in junior high bathrooms
Credit for courage?
Leggy girls in summer clothes
___If only they’d encouraged me more
Chapped lips flake like grated cheddar
Personalities subsumed like phagocytes
and molecules.
Warm palms brush then slither
___If only they’d been more strict
Mattressy eyebrows
Suspiciously perfect teeth
Wear lower heels next time.
Electric feel—Monochrome to Technicolour
___If only they’d applauded me for the right things.
Battle wounds from vampire
neck bites
What a farce.


Mental Incest

The preliminary version of my own life is sticky, sloppy, syrupy and soupy like concentrated pink lemonade. I find myself goaded to anger at the slightest tickle, the most inconsequential prick, any possible hint of animosity provokes audacity, vigorous hair-pulling, merciless arm-scratching, barbaric biting, I’m not above any of it; after tireless attempts to re-invent innocence I realize that throbbing heads, pulsing pelvic bones, red crayon lips and heavy black smoke thrilling the insides of dank moist lungs isn’t exactly innocent. Is innocence pliable like the hinge of a jaw, the span of two wings, the axis of two meaty thighs? Ultimately my thoughts lead to heavy moping, despondent shrugs towards emptiness, my aim for a coercive gesture hangs frivolously, unnoticed, untouched, unkempt like rich, chunky, matted, sweaty hair. You know language can express what a face knows, your primitive astonishment, your pedantic approach, which you claim is the prologue, simply lateral thinking, only excuses, hazy, amorphous, shadowy covers for residual guilt. In fact, your vitriolic spits of languid vocabulary express far too much, like how freshly mown grass is too perfect, unnaturally placid, inexplicably manicured, unnecessarily groomed. I’m picturing you, bated cherry breath, lascivious curving torso OK, caught in the filthy act, that’s me not you, a schoolgirl posing as a harlot, a vixen, a tramp, a hussy, a call girl, a slattern from generations past. Or is it the other way around—a tart acting as a schoolgirl? A whore play-acting as a debutante? Florescent thoughts parachute my snappy ‘take-it-away’ attitude, Ah the oppressive mother, the distant mother, the over-loving mother, has she sharpened her exacting scythe? Has she shined its spiny, scalloped edge? Wicked the erudite commentary from within her lava-hot, frosted-alabaster, cavernous throat—dank, acerbate, curdled stench and all. Lest we not forget her preternatural desire for love: a love rhombus, love in iambic pentameter, a gargantuan dollop of foamy, frothy love. Of course, there are the pursed kisses like raspy shards of metal from her porcelain jaw, that rope of mucus, gelatinous, swollen, opaque, and spongy like a jellyfish. Her immutable humiliation of my mundane memories, why not shove my banal thoughts down my paper-mâché throat like tentacles, pulsing and prying with porcine inaccuracy? Why not?

Vital and probing truth

Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College. She is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues, 1998). Her poems have been anthologized in Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (2005), Are You Experienced? Baby Boom Poets at Midlife (2003), and Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (1999), all from the University of Iowa Press. Seuss’s work has recently appeared in The North American Review, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, and The Georgia Review.

Diane Seuss won the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize for Poetry, judged by Pulitzer-prize-winner James Tate. Her collection of poetry, called "Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open," will be published in Spring 2010

‘ I have been compelled by the slipperiness of persona since I first read Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” and Ai’s poems in the personae of reprehensible speakers. I like the opportunity to abandon the mask of goodness and to explore the pockets of personality where the 8-ball lurks. My most recent project came as a result of listening to my mother’s oral history of her upbringing in rural Michigan. These characters aren’t reprehensible, but they’re complicated. Their mystery can’t be solved. I wanted to get at the weirdness of small town life rather than the nostalgia. I’ve always believed poems can be a potent link with the dead. What can be better—especially at midlife—than to abandon your own storyline and to let the dead speak through you? Persona allows me to abandon my narrow shell and take up residence in a coffee can. ‘

Her poetry in “It Blows You Hollow” is described as a “chronicle of edgy memories, private sorrows, charged darkness; of scarcities, plenitude and dangers,” according to an online review by author Colette Inez.“These sensual and irreverent poems erupt with unexpected turns of language at once elegant and fierce,” writes Inez. “Reading them made the back hairs of my neck bristle in recognition that real poetry is going on here. Hers is a gift of metaphoric daring and wit that dazzles and consoles with ... vital and probing truth.”

Some of her poems

prayer that goes: dear god

then it goes: buttercups.
then it goes: marsh marigolds
with waxy petals that time
he sailed the little boat
with a message stuck
in a film canister glued
to the deck. then it leaps
to watercress salad that time.
then it says i gotta bring this
diction down and not rely
so much on italics. down
so low it sounds country
western. dear god
it goes, and some steel guitar,
reverse the flow of water
and send that little boat
home. it goes:
my son
my son
which is how god answered
why hast thou forsaken
me. then it says
cattails. it says those
cattails that one day
and his hair, the curl
and swirl of it.

i lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate

the paintings of seascapes we won't be seeing in the Louvre.
the miniatures of the infamous Van Blarenberghe brothers.
no rented wooden boats in the Jardin de Tuileries
though this is not about a particular lover or a particular city.
even i am less a woman than a ball of mercury breaking
into forty pieces of silver.

there was talk of Prague, the Klub Cleopatra, that bar called
the Marquis de Sade. as if poetry lies there on a gold settee
smoking a black cigarette in a red holder.
green dress. that Van Gogh green, the color of his pool tables.
the ceiling too is green, and the absinthe we won't be sipping.
the unmade love in unmade beds. small, oversensitive breasts.
Americans always think it's elsewhere. believe
in transmutative sex. i did, when a girl, scrutinizing
my queendom, a colony of fire ants, their thoraxes
gleaming like scoured copper.

hey pauly
it was the barber and the undertaker who got into the heart
of the village earlier than even the firemen and the pharmacist

the barber would call hey pauly that's what he called paul
the undertaker and they'd head for marge taylor's place

for coffee and maybe a poached egg or a fried cake
thrown hot into a paper bag with some sugar and then
marge would shake it and stick her hand down in and lift
it out and present it to them like a magic trick it was said
the barber had the eye for her his own wife home scaling
fish or picking the pinfeathers out of a goose or washing

the storm windows with white vinegar bye pauly the barber
would say as they parted on the street each to face his own
kind of work and although they were such good friends
the undertaker never asked the barber to style the hair
of the dead but he came in every two weeks for a shave
and a trim and never paid nor did he charge the barber's
widow for his services a few years later the washing
and the dressing and the steel comb through what hair
was left. that's how things worked out between them.

what Marge would say if she'd lived to say it:

thatched roof like the one on Stack's garage and inside
six stools covered in split red plastic, five booths, a cement
floor (I'm being honest about its frailties) and an oil heater
the kids gathered around drinking their cocoa, no I didn't
offer marshmallows, no I did not make my own pies,
simple fare, chili, burgers, grilled cheese, coffee, real

cream, the men liked it here because it wasn't home
and they liked me because I wasn't their wife, my own

husband at the Uptown drinking his case of beer a day
with George Stack and Charlie, yes I was bony but I had

a nice smile and that place wasn't called Tom's or
Marge and Tom's it was Marge's, such as it was

the Lee girls had it bad

and their little brother Sonny but they were busy
for a long time on the top floor of that old barn

at the edge of their dad's property and finally
one day led me up the stairs into what had been

the hayloft and removed the bandana they'd
tied across my eyes as a blindfold and there

was the most beautiful playhouse I'd ever seen,
they'd made little curtains for the windows with

a matching tablecloth for the table and cups
and saucers and beds for us and small beds
for the dolls and a wash basin and a vase
filled with wild chives and white lilacs and empty
cans for canned goods and nails in the wall
for our coats, I used to believe all the babies
Mrs. Lee lost when they quit breathing and turned
blue were the lucky ones until I saw the rag rugs
on the floor of the playhouse and the bookshelf
and the Bible and even a newspaper for when
we could get Sonny to play father.


Nothing lasts for long here

You can be one of the richest men in town
today and just a splatter at the bottom of your grain

elevator tomorrow, you can be a town in the morning
and by evening a pile of cinders, the old barber shop
went up in flames, Merle smelled smoke and ran down
to the fire station in his long underwear but it was too late,

all the guys were volunteer firemen but still their houses
burned, the lumber yard burned, later the Hicks house

and field fires out of control swallowing churches,
though never the funeral parlor, which was good

at staying where it was, and always things got built
back up again until these days, when what had been

the hardware store and what had been the drug store
and what had been the Uptown Tavern all burned

within a few months of each other and nothing
moved in to replace them, empty lots bulldozed flat,

Stack's place long gone, Irma gone, I remember
smoke spiraling down the barber pole like a woman's

long gray hair when she pulls out all the pins

A risen star of the international poetry

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort was born in 1981 in Minsk as Valzhyna Martynava. The adjustment of her surname to Mort stems from the student culture there. She subsequently realised what connotations ‘Mort’ could have, and decided nevertheless to retain it.

In the searing work of Valzhyna Mort, marvelously different in form and in delivery...dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her translations, and to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity.” —The Irish Times

“A risen star of the international poetry world,” declares the Irish Times, about Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, who is famed throughout Europe—and now the US—for her vibrant reading performances. Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright

There is an urgency and vitality to her poems; the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love—while many poems question what language is and challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how. The New Yorker writes, “Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” Library Journal described Mort's vision as ”visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark,“ and Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears ”a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight.“ Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English.

Mort received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowshiip at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw, Poland. Her English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in the anthology, New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Factory of Tears has been translated into Swedish and German.

Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person to ever be on the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. She lives in Washington DC.

About FACTORY OF TEARS (2008) Factory of Tears is the American debut of Valzhyna Mort—and the first bilingual Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the US. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems, and startlingly fresh images—desire as the approaching bus that immediately pulls away or pain as the embrace of a very strong god “with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you”—occupy and haunt the mind.

The music of lines and litanies of phrases mesmerize the reader, then sudden discord reminds us that Mort's world is not entirely harmonious. “I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears”, she writes in the final stanza. “I have calluses on my eyes...And I'm Happy with what I have.” Engaged, voracious, and memorable, Factory of Tears is a remarkable American debut of a rising international poetry star. The translation was in collaboration between Mort, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE & THE POETRY OF REVOLUTION

Valzyhyna also speaks brilliantly on The Politics of Language and The Poetry of Revolution. In these energetic and dynamic talks, Valzhyna Mort addresses the poetry of anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe from the 1970s to the 1990s, the time in the twentieth-century when poets became prophets for their nations; when a poem was the only voice of freedom—in such cases, poems were learned by heart and repeated like a prayer or rewritten many times and carefully hidden, because poetry was considered a sin and when a poem was also a weapon, in many cases the only weapon available.

In a humanizing and expanding view of history, Valzhyna looks at poems written at the times of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Solidarity movement in Poland, including the work of poets Adam Zagajewski, Ryszard Krynicki, Julian Kronhauser, Leszek Moczulski, Ewa Lipska, and others. She talks about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the current situation in Belarus, both the political and the poetic scenes—and how the two overlap in the politics of language.

Her first collection of poetry, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, appeared in Belarus in 2005. At that time, she was studying at the University of Minsk. She was not only a poet but also a translator from English and Polish. It was not Valzhyna’s intention to leave Belarus. However, having met her American husband there, she decided to go with him to the United States, where she has experienced considerable success as a poet and performing artist – and has also been granted American citizenship.

Her American debut was the collection The Factory of Tears, which she wrote in collaboration with the married couple Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright (winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2004 for poetry). Until she was sixteen, Mort had envisaged a musical career – as an accordionist – but poetry was her final choice. She comes from a Russian-speaking family and studied Belarusian at school. Because of its musicality, this language became a means for her to create “music in a different form” and to write poetry.

In the course of history, the Belarusian language area has completely or partially been part of Poland on several occasions, and Polish has left behind distinct lexical and phonetic influences in its language. In 1918, White Russia (as it was then called) declared itself independent, but in 1921 the country became a Soviet Republic and a large proportion of the intelligentsia was liquidated. Many Belarusians tend to see themselves as Russians who are part of the great Russian cultural traditions.

In Belarus, such Russian authors as Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva are much read, but many Polish writers such as Szymborska, Miłosz, Zagajewski and Barańczak are also extremely popular. According to Mort, present-day Belarusian poetry is conservative and formal in nature, with roots in folklore. There have never been any avant-garde, surrealist or futurist movements. There are, however, no traces of conservatism and formalism in Valzhyna Mort’s work. It deals with sex; war; skyscrapers; becoming acquainted with the internet for the first time; lack of freedom; repression and corruption; the status of Belarusian; the traditionally awkward position of Belarus between Poland and Russia; and the troubles, sorrows and deficiencies of everyday life. Typical of the repressive atmosphere is the following fragment from the poem ‘Belarusian I’:
completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no And in ‘The Factory of Tears’ we read as a consoling conclusion:I’m a recipient of workers’ comp from the heroic Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I’m happy with what I have.

In 2004, Mort was one of the three winners of the Crystal of Vilenica, the prize for the best poets during the international literature festival in Slovenia. In Germany, she was awarded the Hubert Burda Preis für junge Lyrik in 2008. For a time she was visiting poet at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and she has also been awarded a work and residence scholarship by Gaude Polonia in Warsaw.

Roel Schuyt (Translated by John Irons)

Some of her poems

BELARUSIAN I

even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing
we couldn’t tell which of us was a girl or a boy
we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread
and our future
a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon
was performing there
at the highest pitch
bitch
we grew up in a country where
first your door is stroked with chalk
then at dark a chariot arrives
and no one sees you anymore
but riding in those cars were neither
armed men nor
a wanderer with a scythe
this is how love loved to visit us
and snatch us veiled
completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again
and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future
was leaping through the fiery hoop
of the sun

Grandmother

my grandmother
doesn’t know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water
her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick
her hair bees’ wings
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to America
her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
there’s nothing else you can do with it
only a rose
her arms like stork’s legs
red sticks
and i am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
i’m telling you it’s not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that prickles when he kisses you.

In the Pose of a Question Mark

How hard it is to draw ourselves up
from the pose of a question mark
into the pose of an exclamation.
The left labia of Poland and the right labia of Russia part
and our heads emerge out of . . .
what?
By now we have sixteen names for snow –
it’s time to come up with sixteen names for darkness.In the pose of a question mark –
with our whole bodies we call ourselves into question,
confirmed by a urine dot.
Is it really us calling into a question?
Or adolescence has just birthed
a rumpled beach towel.So blunt were
the midwife’s scissors
which with time turned into
brightly-polished avenues
jointed by a military obelisk.
A tractor plant started manufacturing hair-rollers
and every Sunday sent mother
a gift basket.
Her head in rollers –
the ideal reconstruction of the solar system –
was photographed for albums and calendars.
The principle of rollers clenching hair
underlay the national production of harvesters.
This became my first metaphor
which I gobbled till my mouth foamed
as if I had swallowed the whole Swan Lake.
My body didn’t belong to me.
Bent with pain,
it was making a career out of being a question mark
in the corporation of language.
The bureaucracy of the body drove me to the wall:
head didn’t want to think –
let the eyes watch
eyes didn’t want to watch –
let the ears listen
ears didn’t want to listen –
let the hands touch
hands didn’t want to touch –let the nose smell the body
which blooms with linden flowers of pain.Where are my bees?
Aren’t I sweet enough for them

MEN

men arrive like a date on a calendar
they keep visiting once a month
men who've seen the bottom
of the deepest bottles
kings of both earth and heaven
and like the pearls from a torn necklace
trembling i scatter at their touch
their heartbeats open doors
vessels respond to their voice commands
and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog
and gallops after their train and roams
they undress me as if undressing themselves
and hold me in their arms like a saxophone
and oh this music these endless blues
like milk from breasts
those notes too high for human ears
too low for gods'
men who teach children to laugh
men who teach time how to run
men who love other men in club toilets
men who've kissed the hand of death herself
men who've never paid attention to my threats
nightmares which bound me to a chair
mama their lips fall on me
like burning planes
they are powerful patient
and when the world crashes
everyone runs for the shelters
they pause to pluck one of my lashes
mama not even mine
just anyone's mama
come back
rescue me find me
in this place wreck

A poet with extraordinary power for metaphor

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes, including Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; and Power, Race and Gender in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature.

Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her recent honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2000), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and t J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002.

She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award.


Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes, including Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; and Power, Race and Gender in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature.


Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her recent honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2000), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and t J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002.

She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published five other volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), a retrospective selection of her work; What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998); and Listening to the Singer (2007), a collection of poems out of Malaysia. Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words.” She is also the author of three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1997 American Book Award for non-fiction); two novels, Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006); and a children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). Her first novel was welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Lim's co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published critical studies and edited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, including recently Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and special issues of Ariel, Tulsa Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Concentric. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her honors, Lim received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002), the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Learning to Love America

because it has no pure products

because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline
because the water of the ocean is cold
and because land is better than ocean

because I say we rather than they

because I live in California
I have eaten fresh artichokes
and jacaranda bloom in April and May

because my senses have caught up with my body
my breath with the air it swallows
my hunger with my mouth

because I walk barefoot in my house

because I have nursed my son at my breast
because he is a strong American boy
because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is
because he answers I don’t know

because to have a son is to have a country
because my son will bury me here
because countries are in our blood and we bleed them

because it is late and too late to change my mind
because it is time.

Newcastle Beach

(For Kerrie Coles and Brian Joyce)

At 6 a.m. I set off for the Pacific,

her heaving bosom stretched between

rival lovers gazing from opposite beaches.

Silicate, shell and stone roil beneath her touch,

back and forth, groaning, while she slips

away and toward, teases sun rising

and setting, and the surfer men come daily.

I also adore her, threaded to her fine

eyebrow horizons, changeful swells that raise

my thirst no matter how much I swallow.

I can never be a woman like her,

forever wet, incipiently

violent even when calmed. In Newcastle

young boys and older throw their bodies

passionately at her each morning,

naked male skin carried toward dark rock

and cars. By sides of streets they strip,

wriggle into work clothes, as day

collapses into schools, offices, coal-mines

and their women's arms, awake and sullen

in the world of dry air. They are mermen,

stolen away from their mothers' hips.

And I? Drawn early down to Bogie Hole,

treading the slippery convict-shattered

stone steps, descend to the maddened

slamming of her spittle against tumbled

boulders, gulp the white and yellow sprays

that break, withdraw and break, in digital

seconds never returning. Like our men

moving on to other bodies, while the Ocean

Woman breathes in, breathes out, breathes in,

cradling her surfers past danger and drowning.

Bogie Hole

Before that old crone curse,

arthritis,comes down on me, I walk up Newcastle

Beach to Bogie Hole, where the governor

had a pool carved out of ancient basalt

by Irish convicts. Surf smashes on the rough

hewn blocks thrice every minute

it seems–and white foam sprays in ceaseless

upsurges of power. What power, I ask,

as I peer over the handrails, studying

sea-moss slime-slippery steps cut

into cliff face steep down to Bogie Hole,

studying as if a curious text

the heart skips over, falling in love

with falling, before backing off

from the savor of salt fatalism.

Not yet, my feet say, stepping away.

Today, for the first time I see

dolphins jumping above the surf line,

black fins racing over the Pacific

natural as my feet walking

in sunshine along Bathers' Way.

What has brought me to Newcastle

no one knows, least of all me.

Blue skies and Pacific air the same

as home, leaving home is mere

practice for leaving all, all

the leavings learned again and again,

until goodbye becomes

addictive, the last look

behind, the first look forward,

what you carry everywhere

and everyday. Temporary living

is what childhood taught me.

Packing up, sleeping on others'

mattresses, and always hungry

for the new morning, and night

to be endured, supperless,

sharp as a paring knife peeling

another brown spot.

Writing a poem

(At the Lock Up)

The air is buzzing. Someone near by

is operating a giant machine. He's scrubbing

a just sold building with a high

powered hose. None of us are listening,

although we are each hopeless before

this dizz-dizz-dizz. If it was a monstrous

radiated beetle, we couldn't be more

helpless. It's eating up the hours

as if they were the sweet nectar of day,

which they are. It is impossible

to think or write. Its buzz takes away

feelings, takes over ears, is drilling a hole

in a loose tooth as you sit in history's

dental chair, frantic and still, the drill

hammering gums until only

spit oozes, dribbles, spills over, fills

cavities you didn't know you had,

only the drill lives in your head,

only the sharp dull dizz-dizz-dizz.

This is how the poem ends, dizz-dizz. . . .

Dating
(At the Hunter Street Mall)
I went on another date with my writing today. We've been dating for a long time. I don't know why we keep meeting. It never ends in sex, although sometimes it's led to my reading a book in bed. Often he does not bother to appear. I wait and wait, throat burning in dread, my tight chest overflowing with aches and burrs of anxiety, until I cannot bear the humiliation, even if no one is there, no one's watching, and I don't care, I finally leave, abject and alone, for something else, a nut muffin, or worse, a plate of limp over-salted French fries. I never get really angry. I wish I would, and then maybe I'd say goodbye.

But when he does turn up, I'm fascinated by his blather, it can throw a surprise like an amateur hitting an underhanded blow. Yet I've heard most of his stories so many times I can end his lines for him. You could say I find him a bore, so I don't know why I keep listening.

He's capable of mumbling. Between duhs and ums he may say something I like, and I carry it back in my mouth, imagining it's a bit of worm a magpie crams into the hungry crop of its chick, and I take it out when I am alone, greedy, before I actually swallow it.

We've been dating like this since I was nine. I wouldn't call him a pedophile but he's not a big brother either. No, it's not a healthy relationship, although it isn't exactly sick. And, yes, he's created problems, particularly with girlfriends who get jealous because of his attentions. They don't see how long-suffering I've been. My husband doesn't care. He understands first love comes first. Besides, he's my last love, and they don't offer the same fruit, apples to bananas. I get fed up, today, feeling my age, and want to sit in the shade instead, eavesdropping on busy hummingbirds pillaging fuschias and lilies. They're attractive even if empty-headed. Still, every April, they lay their eggs, and at least one fledging sticks around till summer ends.

Shark Story

I've seen him hobble on one long strong leg,

the other a dangling stump, third a crutch,

in swimming shorts and tee, and sit by Nobby's Beach,

on the wood-slatted bench near the hot parking lot

and sucking surf tucked distant meters away.

He said this sandy stretch, the boast of Newcastle,

appears like acres of salt tears he hadn't shed

when they'd lifted him out of Shark Alley

winters ago, after the juvenile gray snagged

the limb from him, harder to cross with hobble

and crutch and one good leg than he'd first imagined.

Most afternoons between lunch and sunset crowds

he sits watching the black-suited amphibian

boys hurry with bee-waxed boards into the waves.

Yes, they do look like elegant seals in and outof ocean.

Ignore his gaze that says nothing

except wonder where among the particles

of the Pacific his flesh and blood now surge

with the spindrift and its tide, sensation

of thigh and calf and foot and toes clasping

like that bite threshing its fish head still

in the surf most afternoons on Nobby's Beach.

A high school teaching poet of A Clas

FARRAH FIELD

Farrah Field's poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, and are forthcoming in Sojourn and Another Chicago Magazine. Her first book of poems Rising won the 2007 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books. She teaches high school in New York City.

Some of her poems

Intensities of Emphasis and Wonder

The sleeping one is erect and mumbles.
The room went Arctic overnight

and his foot peeks outside the covers.
You leave his warm slumber

five minutes before the new hour,
stomach growling, and possible

moon somewhere. There's slight moisture
still. He'll later say he saw you leave.

The day will happen soon enough—
peanut butter sandwich, dropped knife,

tote bag of graded papers.
Flossing in a colder room,

planning Jefferson myth-debunking,
washing hair—the man's sleep stretches

without boundaries, rolled to middle,
as if it were his bed, thick lashes,

even beard, and no concern for pillow.
He doesn't know it's October and you are happy.

Mother Talks to Herself Before Hunting Her Children

There's no need to investigate kindness. You were
never a there, there back patter. You melted their

coloring sticks to the carpet and they trailed radishes
that ended at a pile of fortified bobcat poop.

They knew you were a witch before you told them.
For the first born, you wished her never to suffer illness.

Then you wanted all of them sick with fever so you could
wipe their sweaty arms below the blankets. The oldest

cared for them and you watched her from your mind,
wringing a cloth in cold water, resting to knit more cloths,

humming tunes you never taught her. You laughed
when you saw their little panties hung on the laundry line,

wind bobbing elastic legs-holes like a xylophone.
Everyone who thinks babies solve loneliness is wrong.

You washed your face with menstrual blood
until they caught you. Once they ran away, you realized

they were what you wanted all along. You had perfect people,
but you were biting the heads off, well, it doesn't matter.

Your daughters never needed you even when you forced them

The Future, Low and Weary

She was killing a piece for quite some time, nicknamed
it the L.A. part, cigarette and Camero, going out to the desert.
You step further into the hallway, jet-lagged, dragging her body.
Others' houses are thrilling, their reek of air and presence. Once
you hid in the doorway, startled Mother when she passed.
Once you went to Keats' house, where he was bled and liked
to sit in two chairs. The gone don't know they're gone,
know what they meant to a pillow. Even this one
with the unfinished tattoo on her ankle, vinyl dress on the floor.
Not feeling is an organized process of pools, Demerol, freeways—
a living fiction. Why has the death mask lost its tradition ?

Preservation is a picky thing; how effective is a face really,
save the expression of the Queen. You're friend, she's a goner.
You hoist her onto her bed and she will lie, saying nothing was ever
snorted. She'll need out as soon as she wakes—the dishes
with stuck cheese, coffee, chances at a straight flush, crumpled
twenty-dollar bills, the abortion. Everything is too heavy to handle,
even a body, those miserable days in school, the boots still in their box.

Never Leave a Rhinstone Unturned

The fancy singer chirps at her own boob jokes,
then sits in a white chair to sing about
Smoky Mountain life while she picks

a diamond-studded auto harp in her sparkly lap.
She's always been like that,
beginning poor and happy

then wigged and marveled,
a bride of future earrings
or ungraspable Tennessee grit

stuck beneath her plastic finger extensions,
and talk of trucks like lovers gone away.
A show or isn't she—

unnecessary background singers,
purple curtains, rhinestone banjo,
the beauty-singer business quality

of this atlas of music and self-promotion,
lip-glossed storyteller, pretty songs,
and possible theme park braggart.

What hurts most here—
my sister wore a wig and stuffed chest
in Mama's cream-colored church dress,

and pretended to be the one-woman triumvirate:
glee, mascara, voice for fringes,
puffy sleeves, wireless microphone, and farmland

How to Break Into a Storage Facility

There were no secret instructions among their things.
It was as though their mother’s house collected
empty hairbrushes and white booted roller skates.
There were no girls to match the reading stools
and uneaten noodles. Nothing had fingerprints,
not even the duck eggs the mother threw
from the girls’ window. I guess they won’t need these,
she said. She didn’t refer to the girls by name.

The detective never worked the weirder cases—
kids being raised by wolves or kept hidden.
None of the neighbors knew there were children.
No one saw them go to school. Their mother refused
an APB. Troubles in the orange house were routine.
There were four piles of ashes found beneath the girls’ beds—
their pets. All this time, the detective assumed

children wanted to go home. Parents prepared
sleds or favorite meals. I don’t think you want to go down
there, the mother said when he approached the cellar.
Generally, mothers’ distraught nature enveloped him
and allowed him use of everything in order to bring
their children back. Millicent admitted four unreported,
missing girls. After the detective’s visit,

the gardener’s tongue was removed. Regardless,
information was slipped to him: call the teacher.
At home, he wrote the county for birth certificates,
before feeding his cat and dog. What would you do
if you found the girls. There are thousands of homeschool
teachers. He tried to hang his coat in the refrigerator.
Something in the new is world. From a branch
on the old willow, eight eyes were intent upon the glass.

The Girls Gather Around While He Sleeps

You’re not as smart as you’d like to be, but you’re smarter than you think.
The day has been long and you’ve accomplished less.
The crab-mauling scar on your foot hangs over the bed.
We picture you growing up on a shore.
Once a group moves from its habitat,
another group is changed.
We pushed the Bighorns further out
and we didn’t mean to do that.
We felt lucky to see them.
Living near people is like living inside.
You smell like our teacher.
She wrapped strawberry preserves and Brazilian nuts
in brown paper. You left them in your locked car.
The note that we wrote hangs above the nearby desk.
Helen Gale. We call her Helena. 3691 Coffee Avenue.
You think you might be on to something.
Your arms are crossed as though you fell asleep thinking.
We wonder if you’ll sleep so soundly next to her,
if she’ll make pumpkin pancakes.
It’s easy to know when someone’s in your house:
listen for a tack being pulled from the wall and paper falling.
When you look for people smarter than you, you look for them.
There are four of us and when we move, eight steps are taken.
We can go no further than your pastures
because we arrived without a trace and no one can do that again
unless by vanishing. A mountain lion hunts your land,
but she doesn’t frighten us.
They say no one chooses their own mother,
but they’re wrong. We weren’t born like other people.
Helena will brew tea for you later. Something has to happen.



The Smartest Person in a Room Never Speaks

We don’t know how the sisters crawled out of the window,
the detective said, counting footsteps from the rocking chair
to the window, then from the desk to the window as if the girls,
scattered around the room, one by one got up and left.

The carpet looks as though it’s only been crept upon.
There are no impediments, even under the platform rocker.
Chairs and other furniture sit very wide apart. If a table held
cold drinks, they couldn’t be reached from any chairs.

Lincoln and his son hang above the fireplace hardware.
The girls call him “fourth boy”. They thought they would
catch Tuberculosis from the portrait. There were Revolutionary
soldiers in the family. The girls wanted to register their names.

Child-size chairs made the detective feel tall in an old way.
He stood in the bay near the Gothic Revival windows.
The four sisters were like deer taking a blooming rose
without any sign they had been there or would return.

The girls hung wooden boxes they made. Their teacher
let them work together, creating one piece at a time,
working without talking. Planning how all sisters plan.
They reupholstered a parlor chair with dark green denim.

No one knows how big houses came to exist, how anyone
could walk in on a daily basis, mount a war-period wall clock,
pollute the cold kitchen with pork dumplings, heat the toilet lid.
The detective wondered if the girls knew how to ride bicycles.

Four wool coats were gone. There was no need to console
the cross-armed mother, who made the detective nervous,
even after she suddenly went down to the kitchen, peered over
the Dutch door and sure enough, a porcelain leg.



We Left Before My Turn

We placed the leg outside the door and the rest
twenty miles in the wrong direction. Old doll,
false lead. Running away is easy

when you hardly talk to your mother.
She ate snails once. But did you see her chew them?
I’ve never seen her chew anything.

We didn’t speak until a week underground.
No one was stitchy. We measured time
by plastic cereal bowls. Our mother appeared

in the garden once. She ran a long nail
up my spine. You should keep a back like that
covered, she said. I’m the littlest. I asked her

what she was doing there. She had powder
on her face; I could see it in the hairs.
She said she’d been up for eight days.

I didn’t look in her eyes as she walked
circles around me. She said I’d never guess
what she was going to do with the turtle

wiggling in her hands, gasping for breath.
It was beyond shrinking into its shell, flaying
the air as though it could swim home.

That is the only time I ate dinner with her.
My orange suitcase smells like my duck.
Our mother probably smashed the eggs

by now. I wonder why she never arranged
baby-sitters for us. Because you had me, Matilda says.
She’s returned from the surface. It’s May.

A criticism on her book

Census mumbo-jumbo tells Americans that the average (more privileged) human being changes career types an average of seven times. To transliterate that statement: the average American with the normal amount of spoonfed opportunity gets all sorts of various jobs to pay the light bill – and thinks they are solely one thing – but they are at least seven things in the helix of a lifespan. Poets are different, however. Because in the U.S., to be a poet is a fringe identity; it’s not a forklift driver, not an ad-exec either. And within that, there are types of poets: NeoFormalists, narrative poets, language poets, swiss cheese poets, flarfers, etc.

Farrah Field claimed, when I recently interviewed her, “Like Anna Akhmatova, I thought I was one kind of poet, but realized I was another. Two things were at stake for me--writing about Heather and making my poems do something they hadn't yet done.”

Heather is her sister and a recurring sort of device or protagonist in the book, also the victim of a brutal murder (in reality and the book). This is a key thing to stay aware of as Heather pops in and out like the kernel of a phantom haunting both poet and reader. A grandmother dies; phones explode; orgasms elude, deteriorate, and detonate.

Rising was unmistakably chosen by Tony Hoagland as the 2007 Levis Prize winner. The book feels like a fist plummeting backwards through at least six (if not eight) feet of mud. The poems come up from behind, whispering and seducing; but as soon as you turn around and arrive at the departing end of a piece, you get punched in the lip. Here is one of those Tyson-fisted endings, from one of the best poems of the year so far, “Weird Luck:”

Once you will be lost in prayer
and will be found craving muffins.

Hope exists. It’s the taste of boy in your mouth.

[. . . ]

A child will die in your arms
and whiskey will disappear from your glass.

Your sister is a ghost with a broken skull.

You are allowed one good memory
in a pumpkin patch.

It’s an apotheosis of the surreal and the narrative, juggling skeletons inside the various closets of memories. Rising also requires the reader to laugh at the grotesque, the perverted, the grave and morbid. Field told me that she has an “unpuritanical attitude when it comes to writing about violence and sex; and I have a pretty sick sense of humor to boot.” At least she is self-aware.

Pieces like “The Telling” and “Your Lordship Spirals,” as well as “Malvern, Arkansas” all prove this grit buried deep in a gray heart. Even more sordidly unfeigned are these gems from “He’ll Have Surgery on His Brain in the Future”: “He looks like a nice boy and acts like a smart person.” She also stakes, “my eyes are big for wrong reasons . . . At home, I mix bleach to clean up maggots.”

A majority of the book is place-based. If an event or a memory is not explicated in Louisiana, Arkansas, Wyoming or Belgium (all places the Air-Force brats grew up) then it is in a backyard, on a porch or in a trailer.

This tends to zip a reader into a centrifugal chaos but can also wrap a comfortable quilt around the reader’s sensibility. Overt sentimentality takes on its usual, angular, undervaluing shape in many poems as well. One of the best/worst poems in the book (worst, due to its sentimental hooks and best, for its politics) is “Hard Times in Animas Forks.” The awfully upright goes: “across my feet. At a mine shaft entrance,/I hear the voices of men who have worked/in the earth: we can’t withstand the soot,/the shitty wages, the constant collapse.”

Her endings are so fierce that it makes the poems’ beginnings and middles feel disjointed and contused. Basically, some feel like the endings were written first. There is also a second person drone in many of the poems that creates a mechanical ambience. And the role of the South is strong; without its grandiosity, Field begins to approach something like a Nietzsche without a Germany.In our interview, Field compared herself to Ahkmatova getting at the point that an artist posits the idea of one crescendo but hears others. I’d rather hear a Field crescendo any day of the week than one from Ahkmatova.