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Writing the motherland
“How many of you,” Betsy asked the audience, “think you know your mother’s mind, maybe better than she knows herself?” Whoops, I thought, raising my hand. That’s arrogant of me. But trying to read my mother’s mind was one of the most urgent and constant occupations of my childhood and teenage years, and I’ve kept…
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Killing your 18th c specialist darlings
My imaginary English Department was overstaffed, according to fictional administrators. Unfortunately, the first readers of my novel ms said the same thing. One of those professors, everyone said, has got to go. And it was pretty clear who had the least seniority. I hated firing the poor guy. Jay’s specialty is not, in real life,…
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The thing about April
My writing ambitions for National Poetry Month were NOT going well. The end of Winter Term–final classes, visiting writers, grading–doesn’t sound like a good time to reestablish a daily practice, but it has worked for me before. I love spring, when the natural world changes so rapidly from week to week, so when, like this…
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Oceanicartography
No, that’s not a real word. But last week, certain currents in my thinking converged, all having to do with maps and oceans. On Saturday, we dropped our daughter off at the Charlottesville train station then headed over to Chroma Projects to see a show by an old friend and collaborator, Carolyn Capps, called “Deep…
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Poetry at the Border 2: Cynthia Hogue
Poet and translator Cynthia Hogue on how borders work: Events today around border issues have brought back personal experience so eerily and uncannily as to seem to me the return of the repressed. The events recounted and per/formed in the excerpted poem that follows, “The Green Card Is Not Green,” happened twelve years ago to my…
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It takes a heap of loafing to write a post
You know those projects kids get in school that are really projects for the parents, where you take clay and macaroni and pipe cleaners and end up with a gorgeous topological map of Virginia? Those assignments always filled me with dread, because I did not have the skill or will to do them myself, as…
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Poetry at the Border: Jane Satterfield
I hereby launch an intermittent feature of this blog–“Poetry at the Border.” Each post in this series will focus on a poet who worries some kind of threshold. Borders of various kinds are always relevant to poetry–crossings in genre, sound, language, and psychological states as well as of national/ cultural identities and traditions–but this topic…
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Spirals, inspirations
I’m returning to a beloved book this week, Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (2009), for a class on place, borders, and migration in contemporary poetry. Meehan’s collection inspired a lot of my thinking about place in verse. I suddenly remembered, as I wandered among the poems again, that Meehan has inspired some rockin’ visual art, too. Here’s a…
