An excerpt from “Why I Stay” by Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17), published by Vandal Poem of the Day.
Why I Stay
In spite of the summers with heat so thick you could cut it with a knife.
I stay even though sometimes it feels like everything is out to get you.
Even though I let the night swallow me whole. Even though I got grass stuck in my spokes.
Because I’ve never had a good enough answer for where I’ve been, where I’m going.
Because belonging is subjective, and I will find my way out of the mud.
An excerpt from “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” by faculty member Monica Youn in Poetry.
S
Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)
One figure is female, the other is male.
Both are contained.
One figure is mythical, the other historical.
To the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, they occupy different millennia, different continents.
But, to the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea.
To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem.
This means that the poem can no longer pass as a white poem, that different people can be expected to read the poem, that they can be expected to read the poem in different ways.
To mention the Asianness of the figures is also to mention, by implication, the Asianness of the poet.
Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance.
An excerpt from “Sky” by Francine Conley (poetry ’14), published by Sky Island Journal.
Sky
I. You put Joy of Cruelty in my hands, which I devoured nights, stopping to brush my fingers over the ghost-thin notes you scribbled. I learned you in margins, studied your doodles like paintings, asterisks drawn like taraxacum––floret-shaped dandelions you penciled next to unknown words like arduous, beatitude. What was it you didn’t understand? I stopped at the underlined phrase: joy is the necessary condition if not of life in general at least of life lived consciously and with full awareness. For you eye contact was impossible. It made you self-conscious. Being seen is unbearable but necessary, you said, before asking me out to sup at the Sample Room. You ordered steak tartar, offered me a bite. I refused, radiant pastures rising in my mind, the otherlife of cows, savage trust of their wet eyes––that look of not-yet-dead-to-be-dead. Raw is the only way to live, you said. Quick glance at me, then the wallpaper, your eyes browning to the color of peeled bark. I studied your face like a murmur. Couldn’t look away as you told stories of suburban agony; a distilled childhood, useless as a two-car garage, the affection your parents avoided showing each other teaching you love as endurance, absence. When you swallowed your eyes closed into a broken kind of ecstasy, pitting desire against disgust. I fell in love when you licked the plate clean. Later, we smoked at an overlook where below the Mississippi churned its quiet terror, swell and flow. A fall carnival on the opposite bank blinked neon. Rides rose, fell. Screams perforated air. Every surface moves, whether we notice it or not––I said: tabletops, rivers, faces, words. Nothing is neutral. The Ferris wheel inched along, our unspoken desire swilled, quietly, steam from our breathing already visible in the crisp night air.
The MFA Program for Writers Southern California Alumni Association has launched a reading series and we are so very excited to hear you read your work! The series is open to all alumni of the Warren Wilson MFA program living in Southern California, as well as all Warren Wilson MFA graduates and faculty passing through. Readers for The Sprawwl will not be judged, but will be lightly curated by the committee for variety, balance and inclusion. Each event will feature two poets and two prose writers. Whether you are a recent grad or a well-established writer, we want to hear from you. We can’t wait to connect and reconnect our awesome community of writers at Warren Wilson!
Our first event will take place at Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena on Sunday, June 9, 2019, from 3-5 p.m. A casual reception will follow the readings, and if we still haven’t gotten enough of each other, we can continue the fun at a local restaurant. A second event is being planned for December 2, 2019 at Beyond Baroque in Venice. We will send out a second call for submissions and more details closer to the date. Meanwhile, if you’d like to read in June, please send us your workl!
Submission Guidelines
If you write fiction, please send 5-10 pages and a short bio to [email protected].
If you write poetry, please send 3–5 poems (no more than 10 pages) and a short bio to the same address.
Your submissions should reflect the kind of work you plan to read and should reach us by March 15, 2019.
It is our hope that writers chosen for The Sprawwl, whether residents of Southern California or passing through, will commit to supporting and growing the Warren Wilson Southern California Alumni Association through attendance at meetings, volunteer work, and/or donations to Friends of Writers.
Looking forward to seeing and hearing you soon!
The Reading Committee
An excerpt from “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10), published by The Believer.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand
An excerpt from “Creation Myth” by Timothy Cook (poetry ’08), published by Rogue Agent.
Creation Myth
Sunday morning you will not be at Mass
but at the ophthalmologist’s office.
More than the chart, the two foot tall E
you can see clearly when you open
your left eye, you will hate the finger test.
How many fingers am I holding up?
the doctor will ask. How many
now? Monday afternoon
an MRI: the camera clicking will sound like
a lawn mower roaring beside your skull
or techno. You will remember
raves, beach-ball-sized nitrous balloons
carried above the roller rink crowd. Tuesday
the diagnosis—
you will know
the look on your face from the look
on the doctor’s face, a mirror
with a skipping record.
Faculty Member Marianne Boruch has published two poems: “I Saw A House, A Field” in The New Yorker and “Pieces on the Ground” in Poetry.
I Saw A House, A Field
Most of the rooms muted by cold,
and the furniture there
with its human chill under vast drapes
of plastic for the season—
Because eventually we are
an austerity, walking room to room
enamored and saddened, all the crazy variations
of bed and table, clocks,
books on a shelf, foreign harbors etched
some yesterday, framed for a wall.
And the effrontery of windows assuming
how lovely out, a certainty
of lawn and woods, distance on a road, voices
that in summer drift up and move away.
[…continue reading “I Saw A House, A Field” in The New Yorker]
Pieces on the Ground
I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog
at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.
And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—
bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,
or lousy light deemed it so.
So what. Give up that so what.
O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up
the thousand-pound if and when too.
Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.
Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19) interviewed by Abby Macgregor in The Massachusetts Review
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I started writing poetry in my childhood bedroom in the log cabin-house my father built. I remember making things up on the page and writing letters to my imagined biological parents in my pink marbled journal. In high school, I wrote poems, looking back on it now, as a way to process my parents’ eventual divorce, and to channel all that teenage angst and rage. It was not until I turned 29 that I started writing again, and taking it seriously. Naively, I had no idea that this literary landscape existed, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an MFA.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My teachers and mentors at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College: Brooks Haxton, Daniel Tobin, C. Dale Young, Christine Kitano, and Sally Keith.
Also: Maudelle Driskell and Martha Rhodes. I would be nothing without Ellen Bryant Voigt and Debra Allbery. And to Mary Oliver, my gateway drug, to whom I’ll always be grateful.
Two poems by Patrick Donnelly (poetry ’03), published by Plume.
Callas and the First Noble Truth
You critics threw her ashes into the sea
Complaining “She had three discrete voices.”
But how good did you think you deserved things to be?
All life is unsatisfactory,
Buddhism teaches.
You critics threw her ashes into the sea
Just as other critics shot good Jack Kennedy
And left him in pieces.
But how good did you think you deserved things to be?
/ˈməT͟Hər/
We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire,
poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.
The head of a woman occasionally produces more heads.
The body of a woman is the source of all our breaths.
See Also: The naming of riverbanks.
See Also: Nature’s tendency to cleave.
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.