“Still to Behold, Still to Be Told:” Heather McHugh’s CAREGIFTED and the Narrative of Caregiving and Disability by Jeneva Stone

A new essay by alumni Jeneva Stone (poetry, ’07), discussing long term caregiving and faculty Heather McHugh’s organization CAREGIFTED, appears online in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I’M A LONG-TERM CAREGIVER, an identity arrived at with resistance, an identity of displacement that pushes away the small of my former self. My son Robert has multiple severe disabilities, the result of a rare genetic disorder, and a braid of equal parts love, duty, and a mutual receptiveness to adventure links us. Love comes naturally, duty chafes, and adventure is what we invent to pass the time. “Pretend you’re a dragon,” I said before Robert’s most recent surgery. The best kind to be is the benevolence-breathing dragon, whose smoky light blue breath makes right again whatever it touches. So Robert went off for his procedure thinking about flying over the world and fixing car accidents and blown down houses and how everyone would cheer when they saw him coming. That time, he failed extubation, and a ventilator supplied his breath for a week.

Read more

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Faculty and Alumni in Blackbird

New poems by faculty members Ellen Bryant Voigt and Dana Levin, and alumni Victoria Chang and Sean Patrick Hill, appear online at Blackbird.

“Lost Boy” by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Two Poems by Dana Levin (also, A Conversation with Dana Levin and Matthew Zapruder)

Four Poems by Victoria Chang

“Gauguin Among the Tahitians” by Sean Patrick Hill

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Faculty and Alumni in Drunken Boat

Work by Program Director Debra Allbery, faculty members Laura Kasischke, David Baker, and Mark Jarman, and alumnus Randall Couch (poetry ’03) appears in Drunken Boat 17‘s feature on Lisa Russ Spaar’s anthology of critical essays, The Hide and Seek Muse.

 

Debra Allbery reads “Of Evanescence”

Laura Kasischke reads “March”

David Baker discusses “Swift”

Mark Jarman reads “Oblivion”

Randall Couch reads “Pressed”

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Eleanor Wilner and Jayne Benjulian in Spillway

Poems by faculty member Eleanor Wilner and alumna Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appear in the June issue of Spillway.

Eleanor’s poem is “Tracking” and Jayne’s poem is “Fault Lines”

Fault Lines

 

I stand on the shore of Long Island Sound,
east, my parents say, you can see Europe.

Somewhere between Madrid and Barcelona
my tongue touched the Castilian c,

the French r has to do with air
slipped behind a glottal stop

not quite stopped,

Russian consonants crash—

                                                 zdraftsvicha, dacha—

like continents,
time lifts at the fault lines,

splits the ground we knew,
impassible: walk through.

 
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Lifelines for Post-MFA Despair

In an online craft essay for Brevity Magazine, Bryan Furuness (fiction, ’08) asks five writers, including Robin Black (fiction, ’05) and former faculty member Erin McGraw, for their advice to recent MFA graduates.

A weird thing happened the other day. A writer-friend contacted me to say that she felt lost and low and miserable about writing. What’s the point? she wrote. Why the hell am I doing this?

In and of itself, the note wasn’t so strange. But consider this: I’ve gotten two other notes like it in the last month, all from writers a couple of years removed from their MFA programs.

Most MFA grads know about the rough patch that often hits the first six months after the program. You feel burned-out and disconnected, and you have to adjust to life without deadlines and mentors and all that esprit de corps. My pastor-friend calls this a “coming down from the mountaintop” experience. For a lot of grads, this is the end: they never write again.

Many of the writers who slog on find themselves in another trough. Somewhere between two-to-four years out of your MFA program, you realize that no one is reading your work: it’s either not getting accepted for publication or it’s landing in obscure lit magazines that few people read. You get tired of answering your super-supportive Uncle Frank, who, every time he sees you, says, “How’s that novel coming along?” which is like every two weeks, and when you say, “Heh. It’s coming,” he offers up some bit of advice, most of which can be boiled down to Be more like Stephen King. …[Keep Reading]…

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Poetry Daily

Today’s Poetry Daily pick is “Psalm 20,” by Patrice De La Tour Du Pin, translated by faculty member Jennifer Grotz.

When you appease my heart, I’ve nothing left to say,
my agitated words fall fast asleep.

I don’t even remember my petty dramas—
your lullaby sings me awake.

Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you
the wound in my chest must stay fresh. …[Keep Reading]…

Also check out June 6th’s pick, “The Relativity of Sorrow,” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer (poetry, ’09).

Mercy is the combing of tangled hair
the sewing up of a split lip
the staying of an execution.
So the prisoner remains alive
until he or she dies a natural death
and the priest returns to say the last rites
one more time like an encore
of rednecks shouting Freebird.
Mercy Mercy Me sang Marvin Gaye,
but he was shot in the head anyway.  …[Keep Reading]…

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Interview with Kingsley Tufts Winner Marianne Boruch

Faculty member Marianne Boruch, winner of Purdue’s $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, was recently interviewed at Indianapolis Monthly. Marianne accepted the award at Claremont Graduate University, alongside Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Marianne was honored for her collection The Book of Hours (2011, Copper Canyon Press), and Heidy for her collection Fowling Piece (2012, Triquarterly).

Heidy_MarianneLAbookFestival
Heidy and Marianne at Claremont University

To tell the truth, I would have been happy—and was—just to be finalist for the Kingsley Tufts prize. I was stunned by that news alone. It’s true I’ve been given other awards in the past—a Guggenheim fellowship, and a couple from the National Endowment for the Arts—but these were to write future poems. Those bought me time. This one was truly a bolt from the blue, and recognized work out there, already completed. …[Read the Full Interview]…

For more photos and video of the ceremony, visit the Claremont Graduate University Facebook page.

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Kingsley Tufts and Kate Tufts Poetry Award Winners

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Faculty member Marianne Boruch has been awarded the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award for her poetry collection The Book of Hours (2011, Copper Canyon Press).

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Alumna Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00) has won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her collection Fowling Piece (2012, TriQuarterly).

“We are delighted to honor these poets and celebrate their achievements,” said Wendy Martin, director of the Tufts Poetry Awards program and vice provost at Claremont Graduate University, in a release. “These awards will help them gain wider recognition and will sustain their continuing commitment to writing outstanding poetry.”  ...[Keep Reading at LATimes.com]…

Past winners of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award include current and former faculty members Rodney Jones (2007), Michael Ryan (2005), Linda Gregerson (2003), Carl Phillips (2002), Alan Shapiro (2001), and Tom Lux (1995).  Alumna Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) was awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2004.

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Poems by C. Dale Young and Victoria Chang

New work by faculty member C. Dale Young and alumna Victoria Chang (poetry, ’05) appears online at Diode.

Learning to Walk

C. Dale Young

The halo, still fixed to my head then,
pinned to the calvarium’s fine table
of bone, almost helped me to balance.
And balance is such a fine quality.
No matter how many times my mother

recounts for me how I first learned
to walk, I have no recollection of it.
But I remember the second time I learned,
because learning to walk as an adult,
like learning anything one should learn

as a child, involves shame and embarrassment,
those snickering sisters who love to watch you fail.
To clutch the two poles alongside you, poles
parallel to the ground you stand on, you wish
you were a gymnast or at least studying

Read more

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On the Art of Susan Stewart

A discussion of the work of faculty member Susan Stewart by alumni Randall Couch (poetry, ’03) appears online at Jacket 2.

stewart-s09 Susan Stewart

In the summer of 2007, I had occasion to be in London for Blind Light, the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective of British sculptor Antony Gormley. The work from which the exhibition took its title — a rectangular glass-walled “room” with doorlike openings at either end and a ceiling fitted with vapor generators and uniform sources of high-intensity white light — involved visitors in an uncanny perceptual exploration. From outside, the boxed and glowing cloud revealed no sign of the exhibition-goers moving within, until here and there a silhouetted hand or elbow floated into view as it approached the glass. Once inside, the visitor experienced an almost complete loss of spatial reference. The vapor’s efficient scattering of light made sight beyond a few inches impossible. Proximity to other persons or to the perimeter could not be judged; the contours of one’s own body became invisible. Sound was attenuated by the density of the fog and the steady breath of the vapor generators. Only proprioception and the ear-brain system’s balance mechanisms remained to orient the visitor, and, absent visual and auditory cues, even these were not always reliable. Despite the brightness hanging in the air, the distant senses — sight and hearing — were as useless as they’d be in a black box. Blind Light, indeed...[Keep Reading]…

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