Ruth

Just a little note while I recover from 10 days of Bennington (unpack, hot bath, Mexican food, download pictures, sigh with nostalgia). . .

I'm a FINALIST for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from Poetry. Yes, indeed, one of 12. I will find out if I'm one of 2 recipients sometime in August.

I will now go back to washing socks and buying books online.

Oh, & by the way: Michael Burkard is an amazing instructor, hands down. Go buy his books. This one, and this one, oh and this one for sure.

Bennington, Day 4

I'm having a good time here @ Bennington! Earlier this afternoon, I was fortunate enough to hear Donald Hall give a "gossip lecture" on Robert Frost & Dylan Thomas. DH & Frost met a Bread Loaf. DH said that Frost's private personality greatly differed from his public "media" persona in that Frost was very competitive (he called Ezra Pound's work "bunk" and "affected"), tough, sometimes mean-spirited, but also nice. However, he was absolutely not the "country bumpkin" that many portray him as in the media. Once, when Frost was reading in Ann Arbor, he was like a "rock star" and when he finished reading and was going towards his limo, he turned around, put his arms up in the air and said, "remember me!"

Frost also carried around a lot of guilt, having lost several children to disease, mental illness, and suicide, which was probably a great factor in his behavior.

Hall's talk on Dylan Thomas was hilarious! DH met Thomas when he came to Harvard and describes Thomas as "an anarchist in that he had no politics at all." Once, when Hall was in England talking to Thomas about a book review, Hall criticized the "death wish" idea, saying, "who would want to die?" Thomas answered, "Oh, I do!" Hall replied, "Why?" Thomas said, "For the change."

Last night, Michael Burkard (my instructor this term) and Susan Kinsolving read. Tonight, Amy Gerstler & Bernard Cooper will read, and in a few days, Jean Valentine will be reading. A dance party will follow tonight's reading. Workshop is going great -- quite possibly the best workshop I've had yet here. Michael & Amy Gerstler are co-teaching, which is exciting. I've finished one poem while I've been here as well, which is quite a rarity. There's a softball game going on right now, but I'm not a softball kind of girl.

Benny

I received my workshop packets several days ago from Bennington (I leave next Thursday). I will be working with Michael Burkard, which I'm really excited about.

Snippet of the upcoming residency: Faculty readings by Sven Birkerts, Jean Valentine, Amy Gerstler, Timothy Liu, Amy Hempel, April Bernard, Dinah Lenney, Philip Lopate, Michael Burkard, Susan Kinsolving, David Daniel, Bernard Cooper, David Gates, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Faculty lectures by April Bernard (on Virgil's Ecologues and the Pastoral), Donald Hall, Jason Shinder (on his book Howl: The Poem That Changed America), David Daniel, Timothy Liu, and Lyndall Gordon (on Emily Dickinson's 'Master' Letters). Plus five 2-hour workshops, a dance party, student open mic readings, and a bowling night.

Unappreciated Butterfly by Michael Burkard

I think I was on a balcony
overlooking the whole thing.
                       —Yusef Komunyakaa, "April Fool's Day"

No soon, no hard loan, no geometric woodwork
to make you feel at home. No soap, no anonymous
bourbon, no portrait or copy of a portrait painted
by some writer or star or family member or any
other-than-artist person. No short drop
(you were fifteen floors up), no secret way
out, no voice of self-hatred (which you are at least
used to). No past tense. Sometimes no tense at all.
Sometimes not even an all or nothing. Sometimes
not even a real estate dream, not even a frame,
not even a framework. A balcony but not a back
kitchen porch. A woman hanging out her laundry
but not hanging out. Railroad tracks and motor-
cycle gang around the corner but not a ticket
or a destination. Not even the sense of a weird
dead end. Not a lemon or a sun. No children.
No stories about children, no crooked arrow.
No ghost named Leslie or Vallejo. No C. No M.
No J.

From Unsleeping