While at the Flannery O'Connor conference in Milledgeville, Ga. two weeks ago, I had the great good luck of meeting Marianne Boruch, one of the featured readers. I liked her immediately. We were standing in the Andalucia farmhouse kitchen, remarking on how it reminded us of our grandmothers' kitchens. Later in the week we talked about all sorts of things. Her reading was memorable, her talk on Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop brilliant, to use an overworked description. In so many ways she reminded me of my friend Mary Adams, herself a brilliant poet and essayist, and although their poetic styles are not that much alike, the ways their imaginations work seem to me to be in sync. I'm pairing them today to show how writers connect without even knowing each other. Marianne and Mary seem sisters in poetic spirit to me. I hope you enjoy reading their poems.
(Phacelia in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, April 2009)
Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago and received a BS from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Grace, Fallen from (2008); Poems New & Selected (2004), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Moss Burning(1993). Her essay collections include In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995). In an interview with Brooke Horvath for the Denver Quarterly, Boruch noted, “Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time, see it closely, carefully, and enact it.”
Boruch’s lyric poems often shake an ordinary moment from its shell, separating strands of thought and habit with a gaze at once wry, self-conscious, and unblinking. As poet and Oberlin College Press editor David Young observes, “Her poems are contained, steady, and exceptionally precise. They build toward blazing insights with the utmost honesty and care.”
Boruch has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program, and was honored with their College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
The Body
Mary Adams grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Smith College, after which she received her MFA in writing from the University of Iowa Workshop, where she studied with Jorie Graham. She later took a PhD from the University of Houston graduate writing program. For the past decade she has taught poetry, Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, and Web Design at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. Her first book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, was published in the University of Florida Press poetry series. She has won a number of awards for her work, including a fellowship fromthe National Endowment for the Arts. Her chapbook Commandment appeared last year from Spring Street Editions. The following two poems are from that collection.
Valediction in March
Today she accidentally broke the gentle
specter of joy. Just yesterday his splayed
body slender as an insect, as a foal
had urged her awake.
Her bed remembered his breath. But now the earth
was brown again. Four birds’ beneficent
notes, sheer and far away, threaded
the mud with red:
a stop sign, a cardinal, maybe a raisin box.
She tried to make the black fronds of trees
uttering up from the hill like radio
towers made out of birds
lie down. She tried to gray the sky until
the light was gone. It was the same day every year.
Four notes dwindled into two, and a wreath
of mud-soaked dogs
crushed a flower’s promise into brown.
It was the same day, starker and longer.
These were the same birds, the same
splinters of grace.
Tame
It's when your house erupts
with animals, dogs on the roof, dogs
hassling joggers, dogs helping themselves
from the icebox, that you know
the man will leave. Why exactly's
harder. A man undaunted by a cat's
flaunted asshole surely knows
love works the wrong end
sometimes. Nor should squalor
scare a man who eats mayonnaise
every morning. Maybe it's
a fear of ghosts, you think.
In a movie once, you saw the hero
tame a wolf and then an Indian.
You’d hoped for such a man,
gentle hands, gold
hair like prairie grass.
Even the wolf trusted him, blithely
standing on his groin
or wagging hopefully for days.
Nothing's worth that kind of wait.
Not you who cannot give the wolf back
to the dog, not he
whose kindness kills the wolf
and Indian before he rides away
at movie's end.
Love makes the wrong promises.
Above you, dogs are crooning from the roof
as from the wild.
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