Diane Lockward
My Arty Ars Poetica: A Cento
...poets pretend they don't know anything
about their own writing processes and get
arty and mysterious when asked about it...
--Kenny Williams, Rattle
I was raised in Abilene. More chickens than humans
down there. Worked construction, captured moments,
created stories. It was solitary work. Below the Blue
Ridge Mountains loved a man with a gnarly beard.
I'm pathologically nice. My brother has perfect pitch.
I write to one-up him. I use an assumed voice, am
learning the names of things, and can't stop--I have
obsessive-compulsive disorder. Once threatened
in a beer joint in Arkansas. Spent hours among tall bolts
of fabric, tins of loose buttons, and leftover notions. My
words are knotted twine. Call it a reinvention. Walked
a peach orchard alone at night and saw the Milky Way,
felt freighted with a sense of mortality. Sleep sounds
like a pleasant dream. Cut my musical teeth in the jungle.
This is my singing, my attempt to insulate the violence,
to euphemize the shooting. Misery is universal. The only
math I know is balance. This is my way of preserving
memory. I make beautiful the moments of terror.
In My Bones
Through
my nose,
downstream
into my throat,
a salmon swims
in my bones.
She navigates
the damaged
ecosystem of my
body, slips inside
porous bones.
Like an engineer
fixing a faulty dam,
she lays her eggs
in the holes, the
hollow reds.
All night I feel her
undulations, the
arching and
reaching of back
and belly. I move
with the flapping
of her tail. Her
voice bubbles up
to the surface.
My ears swoosh
with water and
syllables. I hear her
calling her unborn
as once I called
my own. Pink with
the oily ooze of
salmon, her feathery
flesh, and wild with
desire for fresh water,
I swim upstream,
against the current,
through rapids
and estuaries,
as after long
absence,
I push for
home.
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>Mezzo Cammin featured on the blog of The Best American Poetry
>The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project Turns 50--with Emily Dickinson
>The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project at Lincoln Center, Friday, April 11th, 7-9 PM. Rhina Espaillat, Angela O'Donnell, Erica Dawson, Maryann Corbett, and others.
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Author Erica Jong |
Marion Ettlinger: I was raised in Queens, New York, the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants. I was educated at The High School of Music & Art and The Cooper Union, both in Manhattan. Shortly after graduation, I moved to Northern Vermont, where I lived for seventeen years. Although I have been practicing portraiture since the Sixties, it was in the early Eighties that I found my true vocation in photographing poets and writers, who as subjects remain compelling and irresistible to me still. Using only natural light and black and white film, I continue this work based in Manhattan.
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